Of the Art of Cobweb Painting

I attempted to write Paradise.
Do not move, I said,
allow the wind to speak.
that is Paradise.
Versioning Pound’s “Canto CXX”

1.
planets, that is—the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,
such are their faces
in the Ladin “Val de Puster,”
Tyrolese monks crisscross the mountains harvesting the threads of silkworms and spiders, tubular secretions,
gauze that must subsequently be cleaned, set in layers, and stretched over
a tiny oval frame, depicting, for instance, the beauty of Flemish princesses
or the earliest representations of the world.

this is the sixteenth century
and we watch them advance among the hedges; their capes
flutter and cast shimmers, growth rings or lichen,
they crouch until they can hear the insects fleeing and the shadows retracting;
they introduce their forearms into the darkness and remove the webs;
they lop off the mountain-breast, but they proceed.

2.
imagine entering
the scriptorium, taking
Rainrainrainrainrainrarage Rainiilove
Rainrainrainrainrainrainrainrainrainrai(his lesions were legion)
and placing them on the red deer antlers hung around the walls of the room
—which, in another time, would customarily have borne swords—
or rather, pouring the images of memory onto cobwebs
suffused with paint:
here a pair of peasants, there a saint or a wild lake.

no souvenir to take with you: it’s all part of the chapel’s decoration,
it superimposes itself over the stained glass, it blinds,
it shatters

Cobweb Canvas Portrait of Philippine Welser, housed in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections

3.
slowly, as one might
bring a bud to one’s eyes and with the next turn twist
a striation into the light;
breath held,
they remove butterfly wings, dust particles, the residue of floating worlds from the cobweb,
they apply milk diluted in water to strengthen the gauze
—the canvas so fragile it would take but the brush of a child’s finger to tear it—

4.
because “any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from divinity:”
they steady their wrists, take up a woodcock feather,
watercolors, and water.
then comes the pointillization, that harpsichord concert
no one can hear, no matter its significance.

5.
only a hundred of these postcard-size canvases remain.
a miracle or a lesson. such is memory.

the moon continues its free fall, like the apple,
and a half-beaten sun goes on
shining through the colorless regions of the paintings,
so that the figures
float
against an opalescent background

—the more fragile they were, the more they were cherished,
Ina Cassier writes in the 1956 issue of Natural History—

such is memory:
rescuing a few profiles, skirting others, squeezing in the palms of one’s hand
a stalactite
Rainraior a tear duct
imbuing an oval canvas with the beauty of Flemish princesses,
an art form or a form of devotion (alchemy),
mediated by light,
the world.