Gilt Complex

Staying home, writing ekphrasis

“Tis the season when half my social media contacts are posting exuberant travel photos. I am a rotten traveler; I’ve been out of the US exactly once, and never to Europe. So the poem “Gilt Complex” is entirely a work of imagination, sparked by images of the over-the-top decoration of the Wieskirke and thoughts about the impulse behind it.

Gilt Complex

A concert in the Pilgrimage Church at Wies, Bavaria

I’m thinking of another poet’s phrase
(she called it “buttercreams of ornament,”
the sculpted, gold-leaf scalloping, the crazed

swizzles on so much German Late Baroque)
because I’m staring at a prime example:
As though their last restraining impulse broke,

great swirls of stucco gilt explode around
cornice, cartouches, capitals, organ case
and altarpiece, all set against a ground

so white it hurts. How was this sort of thing
dreamt up—this overwrought, over-the-top
whirligig, vortex, whipped-cream lavishing

of heavenly wedding cake? Well, simply: stock
miracle tale. An old carving—the Scourged
Savior—was said to weep, and pilgrims flocked

trying to grasp the pouring-in of Godhead
on life’s poor drudgework. That’s when Art took off,
giddy to get that holiness embodied

in exultation. Oh, I know the drill
with thrills; I’ve done my time in choirs, ecstatic,
shaken core-deep with the eternal swirl

of Bach’s Johannes-passion, its Herr,
Herr, Herr, the churn and whirr of winds and strings
that lift a hundred singers into air,

lost to our ordinary selves an hour
or two, the fugue tumbling around our heads.
That’s why I have my doubts about the power

of Art to save. The last few notes alight;
we sift out idly to the brilliant noon
of Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit;

and here we are: blinking at glare, adrift,
the grumpy dailiness of being human
hemming us dully in. That’s why I’m left

skeptical that this selfie-snapping team
are pondering the sublime, doubtful their souls
grow feuertrunken with all this buttercream,

troubled by so much writhe and fidget. And
by the clipped consonants of all this German,
smuggling into my head the contraband

of cloudy newsreels from my Fifties childhood
and hates I hope I never understand.

(First appeared, in slightly different form, in Literary Imagination,
Will be in the forthcoming book Notifications from the Unseen.)

(Photo credit: Mattana, public domain)

(The phrase “buttercreams of ornament” is from Mary Jo Salter’s poem “The Bickers.”)