Bosch’s Birds

Garden of Earthly Delights, central panel
Hieronymus Bosch c. 1505-1510

In a day-dreamed tapestry, figures clamber
toward a viewpoint, harmonize lust and eating:
what we want combines in a giddy, sunlit
landscape of pleasure.

Noah’s children (all of them twenty) pose like
dolls, small nudes sporadically tangling limbs with
wilder creatures. Love here looks odd, a trick of
light and sensation

gauged by others: avians aim their blinkless
stares. They’re huge. A vigilant mallard nudges
larger juncos; orioles, kites and shrikes launch
oversized warnings.

What do birds know? Bosch makes them gaudy liars,
hardly scientific though close enough to
trick us (colors splatter just wrongly, beaks have
shortened to stick-pins),

and they’re preternaturally calm. No flight, and
even Owl’s “who-cooks-for-you?” stirs no bridled
appetite: no gourmandised humans litter
hunger’s own garden.

Beaks clamp. Tiny lovers relax, yawn smaller.
Even thus they capture desire: though less than
real, they loose a flood of unbidden, prized and
hybridized wishes:

Size unequalled. Edible dreams. A stranger’s
wingspan. Unfatiguable sight. What once could
charm us, flown. What pained us so, kept. A world of
nights which get lighter.