The Ultimate Antientropy

Whether one paints five Helens

after some much experienced woman

or develops one, his beau ideal,

from the five, most lovely, untouched

virgins of Crotona (such Cicero's

account of Zeuxis' purist practice)

or laboriously patches her together

cheek by jowl out of all the women

he has shuffled through, is not

their end the same?

		So even he

who will not let the name of Helen,

or woman for that matter, be attached

to what he splotches on the canvas,

refusing to be tamed by recognition—

for he claims he paints a painting,

not a landscape, apples, females—

deems he's plucked from out his head-

long brain and brush a universal

as it is a most unique,

		concrete

past any momentary model. And though

we may wish to celebrate the fleeting

or applaud the theory as it lords it

over its bleak and boring product,

Zeus, we recall, laid all (this every

time) his eggs in one small basket;

the consequence, in the most famous

case, was a Helen who inherited

her papa's quality

		most jovial:

being so promiscuous, so radiant-

ly loose, that we have hardly seen

the last of her. The sparks her eyes

shot forth are seeds that will not die.

Men far flung still warm their hands,

their hearts, and more at the thought

of her as at the Troy the flint

of flesh against the tinder of a god

produced.

	Helen, it seems, is more

herself the more she's reproduced.