Clarence Wolfshohl

Nandor Glid’s sculpture at Dachau

a moat
          ten-feet wide
                    water-filled

a slope of loose
          gravel for no
                    footing

more slope
          covered by barbed wire
                    netting to catch

ankles like butterflies
          floating southward
                    in their destiny

then the fence
          rows of barbed wire
                    six inches apart

electrified

A man would splash,
          then scramble in scratching
                    agony up the slope,

be ensnared in barbed
          netting only to be entangled
                    and electrocuted in

strands of wire.

left to hang
          in sinister angles
                    as warning when

grey dawn lit
          the compound
                    the already skeletal

body rotting to mere
          bone on which the state
                    fed

the sculpture’s seven bodies caught
          in the wire
                    one suspended escapee

twisted into a swastika

Clarence Wolfshohl
Thomas Hart Benton’s Persephone

She’s older than I’d think,
all those accounts of her and the maidens
gathering flowers in spring meadows.
And Hades, too, more a middle-aged man
than a primal force, a chthonic urgency.

He reminds me of my neighbor
who raises a few head of cattle
and acres of feed corn. The field
of sheaves beckons in the distance,
but he is in no hurry to gather them.

He gazes on Persephone,
his long laboring fingers inches
from her hip. Her hip is not round
in virginal succulence, more angular
to reflect Hades’s creviced face.

And her face, as she reclines
in pin-up calendar pose, is a knowing face.
The curve of light of nose and brow
hints of eyes closed by choice not chance
as if she anticipates his first touch.

Before Hades’s deed the world
was in perpetual spring, all flowers,
all innocence. Her mother’s tears
created the seasons, so the story goes.
But what of fruit, of gathered sheaves?
The knowing face?