Dürer: Innsbruck 1945 Poem by Justin Clemens

I, quiet, reflecting, reversed my inanimate lids,
not knowing then that the high heavy black
spires and closed roofs had often shrunk to snows
in the waters glimpsed in the vision
of an interloper air. At the back, cowled in the real
All, now I find Dürer repeats once more,
that, slumberous, the alien dead trespass on mind
to find colourful ignorance, dream-painted waters,
men’s books warned of it. As robber of the would-be,
I knew it, perceived it too, in the easy art that I have.
I am still that swan, but others had not read its I
is no one.