Melancholy and Mystery of a Street

(after Georgio de Chirico)

She’s a shadow herself, though the hoop’s solid,

and, yes, out of the diminishing returns of arched doorways

she’s close behind. Beware tall encroaching citizens. Beware

the colonnade of sunlight.  Beware tense isometric shapes

like the wagon with the deceptive inner space

which isn’t space at all but flat boxed lines you’d run into

at a walk even . Doesn’t she know her world

is about to crack along invisible seams; that it will drift

apart in incoherent pieces.?We knew. We saw how the buildings

behaved, defying the horizon.; windows, black, sheared-off.

We cannot blame the artist. This is no inability to master

the laws of perspective; ‘this non-sense’, he’d say, ‘is, in fact.

life’,  looking for all the world like an egg with the likelihood of

allowing itself to be broken and spill , well, runny

yellow life over our fingers. We, the metaphysicians, would approve.