Beauty corrects the symptom known to us as sight.
Never, never, will the eyes see things right.
So beauty must fix the mistakes we see.
Or life and art would both be ugly.
We survive, but beauty is the reason we see.
The blind worm survives. And fleetingly.
The measure of all is based on how long
It takes beauty to correct the modern wrong.
The painting is yours, but the reason for the painting is me,
And you painted my love for your beauty falsely;
You were too modest and ashamed.
The too beautiful beautiful will always be blamed
For making us ignorant, immoral, and ashamed.
The beautiful painting knew to show
Beauty, so knowing would know what to know.
The perfect is an idea—but what do we see
When painting’s perspective is illusory?
We see perspective in its various moods:
Air, mist, or sun, which now the shadow includes,
Bright vistas, and whatever strains to escape
The vista: the column, the orchard, and the rope,
The rope at the end of the red road,
Where the world lays down its holy, Walt Whitman, load,
For the slow, lifetime plowing of a field,
Which the grim god knows will yield
A crowd crying, unruly, massed
For citizenship, for salvation—
Food, sports and sex: the harbor inside a nation—
Looking at us in the past.