Visiting the Cave of Pech-Merle
Children are impatient.
They fidget, they chatter,
they squirm along the barrier bars.
Their parents restrain them.
One thinks of Disney: bear
hollows, stalactite droppings,
stalagmite cylindrical mounds,
remarkable white phalluses.
Electric lights create shadows,
highlight heights, sharp contrast
of gold, brown, red, black, white,
concrete steps, stones, rails.
Then the
Chapelle des Mammouths.
No 20th-century entertainer
would have thought to etch these
mammoth, these oxen, bison, horses,
to paint them in charcoal, to mark
a mammoth in bold red strokes
of ferric oxide, irregular lines,
of red that signify--what?
The cave would have been
worth seeing for its natural beauty
alone, a stupendous oyster whose
floor creates calcite pearls
to this day, and a top
spun around such a pearl
in a miracle of calcium carbonate
spun in a waterlogged hole.
Turn off the lights and
you get dense dark,
stuff of nightmares.
Turn them on--enchantment.
A Zen-like miniature antelope and a hand
outlined in red. Red dots along the right
cascade like drops
that form pearls & dripstones.
Outline of a bear's head
etched in stone, bear claws
in deep parallel lines, linear
manmade shapes that mean--what?
Now the guide, a young woman,
points her red laser beam
at what anyone would have missed
had she not done so.
On a rock above us and way
out of reach: the outline
of a skull--or a man's head--
his body drawn lightly
as a child would draw it,
and spear-like projectiles
wounding him as if he were a sacrifice,
a wounded healer or a priest.
Now surprise startles me,
though I expected it:
my first glimpse of the spotted
horses: the shape of the rock
is the shape of a horse's head,
yet the artist chose to paint
his horse's head into a fine
stylized terminus and to make
black dots surround the mane
and the slopes of the body,
the body itself dotted as well
like the horse facing opposite, both
punctuated with red dots that signify--
what? These are not horses one would ride,
unless, transcendent, one
leaves one's body and enters
a spirit realm, for these are
dots of desire to see what's on
the other side, beyond the wall.
To see is to know.
Here spirit has legs, sacred,
to gallop into healing regions.
Six hand prints--outlines of hands
in black--surround as if to signify--
what? "I made this"? Or is it we?
And one of the children, silent now,
stretches out his hand
to connect to ancestors
seven thousand generations ago;
just a few years younger than
the adolescent boy who left
his footprints on the muddy floor,
this boy child will not forget
Pech-Merle, nor the live oak root
penetrating into the cave, twelve
meters to the floor, the solid floor.
Copyright © by Clifton
Snider, 2007. All rights reserved.
My poem was first published in
the
Arabesques Review, along with
two other poems, "Watts Towers" and "Family Bones." All these
poems may be found in my new book of poems,
Aspens
in the Wind.
Go to
Art
and Poetry for some of my
poems inspired by paintings.
Go to
Art
and Poetry II for a poem on
The
Beguiling of Merlin, also in
The
Age of the Mother.
Go to
Art
and Poetry III for
"Epithalamion," by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and
The Bathers
(1867),
by Frederick Walker, two examples of nineteenth-century homoerotic
poetry
and art.
Go to my poem about
Christina
Rossetti.
Go to my poem about
D.
H.
Lawrence.
For another poem in
The Age of the Mother, go to
New
Age.
Go to
Native Themes in Art and Poetry.
Go to The
Shalako in Poetry and Art.
Go to
a poem on a Zuni mountain lion
fetish carving.
Go to
Poetry and Criticism.
Go to a poem on
The Cave of
Niaux.
This poem has also been translated into French by M. Patrice Fauchier
and by Jean-Claude Frachon; see
Jura
Spéléo.
Go to "
St.
Anthony's Church".
Go to a poem on
Le Mont
Saint-Michel.
See my poem for
Selena.
Read about my
early books
of poems
before
The Age of the Mother (1992)
and
The Alchemy of Opposites (2000).
Read about my novels,
Wrestling
with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers,
Loud
Whisper, and
Bare Roots.
See also
A
Poet Against the War.
Reture to
Top.
Home.
Page last updated: 1 April
2009