Incidental: Seeing Faces

Uccello, c.1438-40, ‘Battle of San Romano’, the Louvre panel
I can’t not see it; the face once formed

I can only meet again in recognition; it hovers

east-northeast, head-height,

an agreeable Horrour. It takes

for its eyes the slight openings

of soldiers’ helms, its red mandrill nose bridge

a length of painted lance, its bared teeth the bronze discs strung

along a horse’s browband. I see it because I’m averse

through tiredness, modernity,

to making any sense of the action.

The upright lances induce in the whole formation

a wobble, the way of human-turned wood,

unyielding but uncertain in the elements.

There is an enjamb of horses

being turned by humans, snagging on

each other’s articulated finery.

Uccello is still torn between a love of surface

and that new mistress with the sweet-spot,

one-point perspective: both claim each line

for its masculine cause or feminine upkeep.

Peace is surface decoration. Sex is a horse haunch

turned to face. War is a one-point perspective.

The problem with allegory, it longs

for a one-to-one with reality, a true romancing.

The mandrill face, unlike,

is fit for seeing not meaning.

Call it primitive, but then it will turn up

at the telos party. All our bright-bitted technologies

will throw us—still wildly asserting our bodies

through space—in front of this mandrill

mid-saying: ‘if you misuse me for a

beginning or end I’ll let that happen too.’