Europe in the Nineteenth Century: A Stereopticon

Zack Rogow

Wrecked on opium, Thomas DeQuincey

sees Coleridge’s foot as a goldfish

in an aquarium missing its walls.

The young Alfred de Musset is touching

George Sand’s left nipple

with a sable watercolor brush.

“Tu m’aimes?” he asks her.

“Et toi?” She turns her head

and blows cigar smoke in the face

of the Paris dawn.

Beethoven is having a bad hair day.

Darwin, bent over his bird’s-eye maple escritoire,

collaborates with a dead mackerel

to prove that God left no forwarding address.

As he inhales a blur of lavender

by the moon bridge,

the aging Claude Monet paints so furiously

he erases the garden he loves.

Meanwhile Bismarck ascends

to the base camp of the Schneefernerkopf,

so he can survey

from the blue jewel of the glacier

all the placid little duchies

waiting for his strong arm.

Under the pontifical dome

of the British Museum Library

Karl Marx claps shut a frayed ledger

scored with statistics

on English textile production,

realizing he has just found the key

that unlocks all history, all thought.

A tiny map of ink

has formed on the side of his hand,

blood-red.

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Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost, was released by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing in 2024. Zack’s ninth book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, was published by Regal House. His most recent play, Colette Uncensored, had its first staged reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and ran in London, Indonesia, Catalonia, San Francisco, and Portland. Zack’s blog, Advice for Writers, features more than 280 posts on topics of interest to writers. www.zackrogow.com