Matthew Ryan Shelton

Smugairle Róin

“Were there any other gods he could defy,

he wondered, or re-arrange?”

                             - John Berryman, Dream Song 314

Blind with the sea-swell his hide,      hands hauled with brown kelp caught

in tow, he shot up in the flood.      His salt skin split, gas-filled his gut

inflated like a leather bladder      stitched together with a weathered thread.

It was on a Sunday morning      I went walking down along the shore

where highways met, knotted, and fanned      out again to other towns

and other cities, elsewhere. The sun      was out. I came upon him there,

a bloody hulk of ocean, blind      his bloat-bulk bellied with sour wind

down from the refineries and set upon      by scavengers. I came upon

him in the midst of crowding round      his flotsam form unfigured as a man-

o’-war, or mucus, clotted on the sand.      A thing swept in from sea-

lanes and embroidered on the beach,      disordered, with the tide. And me,

my lips were wet. My eyes found out      his still-eyed sockets. Line and sinker

settled in the midst of me, a wrecker      like himself one might imagine,

the blood washed from his eyes, his maw,      and blow-flies, snails, and crabs

ensconced and muddying his flesh,      preoccupied and jostling for the coins

of his eyes. The cut-throat commerce      of his corpse, the art and article.

In the exchange he had already lost      what little was left of his shirt.

He was a wreck of a man. Discovered,      disinterred, and disassembled

on the sand. It was as if he were      alive, the way the light fell,

in the guise of some forgotten god,      a multitude of moving things.

River after river springs      to mind. What sort of thing was this,

I thought, from some land-locked country      somewhere in the back of my mind.

What exile did his body plot,      what exodus was traced across

his corpse, a corps of creatures now      become a living, breathing thing,

a tributary in its breaking bounds.      Some strange tribute of translation,

had he once, when no one was      watching, haunted riverways

from even farther inland, first      expelled, split with a hatchet

to his sternum, of two minds,      and then returned to bear witness

a second time. The grain of his flesh deep      canals in the earth of him,

I remember, and the velum      drawn across his countenance

and snakes for hair. A face. A text.      Standing there, I turned to stone.

A jellyfish was on my plate,      chopped up and heaped with oil infused

with chilis, tender, sweet      and sour. I hazarded a taste.

Like cartilage, or tripe. But      tenderer than tripe, I thought,

the glottal stop of it, its heat      turning me garrulous, upbeat

its thorn against my palate,      dendrites palled by capsicum.

Quartz and quartzite that by lightning      sometimes fuse into a sheen

of drift and weather, shell and bone      that have become a beach,

each grain of sand worn smooth by hours      and eras. Fragments from ocean,

stone and skeleton, heaped up      in the ancestral flood

in order to establish an island      or compound a continent.

Deep down the tracks of inter      lating plates. Glass and hourglass

bleached bone-white and exposed      to the hanging sun, the day stood still.

It was on a Sunday morning      I went walking down along the shore

where highways met, knotted, and fanned      out again to other towns

and other cities, elsewhere. The sun      was out. I came upon him there,

borne farther inland, lifted,      carried on the rising tide –

a sudden bloom of hunger, knotted      cords and courses, sinews trailing

bloody figures frayed away,      the hair shirt of a busy torso, flayed

on the shore of some unbounded latitude,      brine-dark and fathomless again.

And in what might have been mistaken      for what might have been day’s end,

and as the tide returned the swarm      dispersed, back to oblivion,

deaf and dumb and blind again,      carrying Manannán with them.

The Turkish Bath

after Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1852-1859/1862)

            1.

One of my father’s favorites.

The one Don Ellis took

and reused

for his album, Electric Bath.

He would put it on

the stereo at home

and listen to it on repeat

for hours,

him cooking in the kitchen.

I recall the artwork

on the cover, looking

close at it from time to time.

That’s where I first remember

it, The Turkish Bath.

            2.

I cannot say why

I recall it here, in a steam room

at the Hyde Park Y.

A rundown single-story building

on Guadalupe in Austin, Texas.

The smell of cedar, water droplets

hissing on hot stone.

I watch the sweat fall

drop by drop.

Among these figures now

I am reminded of

Ingres, remembered

in the abstract,

somewhere in the Louvre

            3.

the summer I was twenty, when

the Denon Wing was under renovation

and, because it was, closed

to the public.

I read up on him

in my hotel room later on

that evening. Le Bain Turc,

his late-in-life masterwork, was first

seen by the public

in 1905. The Louvre

refused it twice before

it acquiesced at last

a few years later, hanging it up

in the Denon Wing.

            4.

Look, it’s worth knowing that

the Denon wing in which the painting hangs

is named for Dominique-Vivant Denon,

a diplomat and artist

who accompanied Napoleon’s incursion

into Upper Egypt

in pursuit of Murad Bey in anno domini 1798

to document the progress of the troops,

to take in the sights –

such as es-Salamat,

two massive stone colossi

standing in the broad

necropolis of Thebes

near Luxor.

            5.

Commissioned by the Prince Napoleon in 1848,

the painting is much smaller than

you might expect.

It was returned, according to

the Louvre’s description, later

because it shocked the empress.

“The foreground is dominated by

the interplay of arabesques

at the expense of anatomical precision

and any effect of depth.” Apparently

one inspiration for the painting

was the letters of Lady Montague, who

once visited the baths in Istanbul

and wrote it down.

            6.

Ingres, who made his money

painting portraits

in his youth, paints us

a portrait of a landscape

colonized by his own pictures.

Look, within

the tondo frame (à la Raphael, his hero)

the woman in the foreground in a bathing bonnet

cradling a lancet mandolin

as if it were a child

is the same Valpinçon bather he had painted

when in Rome, La Grande Bagneuse,

some forty, fifty years before. Madame Moitessier,

behind her, elevates a coffee cup.

            7.

See, I would sit for hours

before the stereo at home, looking

at this picture, listening

to harmonies I’d never heard before,

trombones and other horns

looped through effects pedals, electric

guitars like Mahler’s saxophones,

and saxophones like tears of joy, an atmospheric

wawaing curvature of sound like arms akimbo

in a pose (this wasn’t

Ellington or Basie – was that

bad? I couldn’t tell)

a figure, I suppose, that

leads you back to

            8.

the artist’s wife

Delphine, remembered

from a croquis he had painted

in 1818,

reclining in the foreground,

a lavish laden tea tray at her feet.

A hareem of plump pink

steam-bleached figures,

vases, running water,

fruits and jewels. Colors

lavish a propos that sort of scene.

Pale whites, pale pinks and

ivories, light grays and

royal blues. A single darkened face

            9.

in foreground and another

in the back. Both almost

overlooked. Two serving girls.

He did not paint

Le Bain from living models. No,

these figures are his own

wan odalisques and bathers

he had drawn or painted

as solitary

figures first, portraits

on beds or on the edge of baths,

their shoulders

lowered, eyes and faces

turned away.

            10.

See, standing in the broad necropolis

of Thebes near Luxor,

es-Salamat was in Denon’s time

two massive stone colossi

the Northern twin of which, because of fissures

in its quartzite torso fractured by an earthquake,

once sang

when the wind was just right, within

an hour or two of sunrise.

Inscribed upon the statue’s base,

testimony of some ninety eye-witnesses survives

attesting to its stony lyricism.

Pausanias, for one, compared the sound

to the twang of a lute-string breaking.

            11.

I can hear it now,

his horn soaring in complex

chromatic arabesques, his horn

equipped with an extraneous bespoke fourth

valve subdividing its already complicated scale into

quartertones, inspired by the raga system of

the Indian Subcontinent, in which the string

of a sitar, say, – a lute –

is pulled akimbo, the note bent

with such precision as to constitute a melody.

It is this “bending” of the note

that is the hallmark of this music he was listening to

at the time of the Electric Bath. You could almost

see the sound . . .

            12.

a lute-string breaking . . .

Others allege the singing of

the broken twin was

due to the change in temperature

and dew evaporating in the porous rock.

Renowned as the “Vocal Memnon,” reclaimed

and reconstructed by Septimius Severus, Emperor, ostensibly

to curry favor with the oracle. (He could not

hear the statue singing.)

It was Napoleon’s campaign that fired

a renewed interest in all things Oriental

back in France, from which Ingres drew inspiration.

One of two obsessions close to his heart, according to the website:

“the Orient and the nude.”

            13.

And what about Ingres?

That he felt, aetatis LXXXII, he still retained

“all the fire of a man of thirty years”?

A dirty old lech?

      Proponent of adaptation

and appropriation, his oeuvre

a globe of garnet fired from clay.

His little painting

just a figment grafted onto stuff

culled from the quarry of what

the European mind mistook

for decadence. What

they could barely understand.

An antique landscape of our witness

looking for

some beauty in the violence of looking.

I mean, it is beautiful, isn’t it?

            14.

I cannot say

why I recall it here, The Turkish Bath. Tonight

we hang our heads, sitting together

on the benches of the steam room.

Me and him, my father,

in my mind. We nod

in dim proximity. We do not speak.

Exhausted. Bodies breathing. Listening.

I purge the water from my ears and watch

the sweat fall drop by drop by drop,

the image in my mind. The one

Don Ellis took and reused

for his album, Electric Bath.

One of my father’s favorites.