lopes in bronze:
scruffy,
then. In
the Museum of Modern Art
head
down, neck long as sadness
lowering to hanging ears
(he’s eyeless)
that hear
nothing, and the sausage
muzzle
that leads him as
surely as eyes:
he might
be
dead, dried webs or clots of flesh
and fur
on the thin, long bones—but
isn’t, obviously,
is obviously
traveling intent on his
own aim: legs
lofting
with a gaiety the dead aren’t known
for. Going
onward in one place,
he doesn’t so much ignore
as not recognize
the well-
dressed Sunday hun-
dreds who passing, pausing make
his bronze
road
move. Why
do they come to admire
him,
who wouldn’t care for real dogs
less raggy
than he
is? It’s his tragic
insouciance
bugs them? or is
it that art can make us
cherish
anything—this command
of shaping and abutting space—
that makes us love
even mutts,
even the world, having
rocks
and the wind for comrades?
It’s not this starved hound,
but Giacometti seeing
him we see.
We’ll stand in line all day
to see one man
love anything enough.
“Giacometti’s Dog” by Robert Wallace was originally published in Ungainly Things (Dutton, 1968) and is included in the collection The Common Summer: New and Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989). Used by permission.
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When artists take the time to sculpt (or paint, film, lyricize, etc.) a subject, they inevitably give their careful attention to that person, place, or thing. And attention is a form of love. The best artworks succeed in conveying that love.
In his poem “Giacometti’s Dog,” Robert Wallace muses on how modernist sculptor Alberto Giacometti poured heart, mind, body, and soul into portraying something so “unworthy” and unattractive as a stray dog. Why dignify the malnourished, matted canine with a bronze cast and prominent display in a world-class museum? And why do all the gallery visitors crowd around to see him?
Wallace determines that it is the artist’s love for the dog that attracts people to it. If Giacometti thought him a fitting subject for a sculpture, then he must matter. He is worth attending to. “Art can make us cherish anything,” Wallace writes. Artists show us where to look and teach us what to love.
Art & Theology 