Looking at the right hand panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Temptation of Saint Anthony, we might ask  ourselves what was it that so filled the painter’s mind with a (we can guess) a delighted but disgusted eagerness  to depict so many manifestations of sin.  Is there something stimulating to the imagination about seeing living beings as repulsive?  Do appetites (necessarily) transform humans into monsters?  Is the world so full of sinning or does the presumably holy book in Anthony’s lap focus his and his painter’s visions on such activities?  Are souls so good that bodies must be depicted as so bad?

Or, as the speaker in Thylias Moss’s “Ode on a Cat-Headed Consort in a Painting by Bosch” suggests, does studying the panel lead one to conclude that it is particularly a man—Anthony—who sees the world as devilish temptation?  To think of the panel with that focus leads the speaker, who is as ready with words as Bosch was with paint, to write a flow (a hymn?) of pointed, joyous, misandrist language—a sustained, aghast giggle.

According to the speaker  of “Ode” men suffer from “the disease for which there is no cure, just mercy.”  And the Anthony in Bosch’s  triptych seems unable to cure his lechery.  On the right hand panel, directly before him (if he could turn his eyes from staring out at us, his—I take it—sinful observers) is “a white whore masturbating in a hollow tree,” the hollow looking like “the labia majora of a giantess.”  In an italicized voice that seems to capture Anthony’s thinking, we confront the sights directly before him:

                                                         The harlot stands in water

too murky to consecrate, the only water in which immersion won’t redeem

for it is too full of desire whose diaphanous crystallizing filaments reach up    

from the pool to her thighs and hindquarters, extending from there to a glutinous devil

whose head rests in a devilish horned flower, whose right hand  holds a bowl

into which flows iniquity from a chalice that does not pour, but seems to bleed

its liquid.  The canopy is red although advent is white, red for those profane nuptials

in which sin couples with everything.  The whore white as perfection’s aspiration

is of swollen belly for her sin incubates, and her cat-headed consort catches for her

a fish ruined for having to depend on water she controls; why semen evacuates its

                gills and

travels the thin tubing of the web, the snare to enter where she  guides it.  Fish

and whore carry a like number of eggs.

 In a world where a whore can be “white as perfection’s aspiration,” a partridge—a bird prone to tiring “frequent intercourse”—might disguise itself as a woodpecker.  Or someone in “gracious turquoise” dispenses “communion to one it intoxicates.”

Confronted with the profligate, perturbing detailing we find in Bosch’s painting, Moss’s speaker writes a poem in which the dominant, framing voice (the one not in italics) expresses sympathy for Anthony’s plight but doubts he—or any other man—can escape sexual appetite.  (The last two weeks of American political discourse perhaps bare this worry out.)  Men are (to point up the fun Moss has with some of the breaks between her verse paragraphs are susceptible to “Pure // physical attraction”: priapic men have a “commitment // to manhood”;  they go around with untamable penises  that are so often  “fully prepared // to mate.”  From Anthony’s point of view this readiness for copulating means men are “not” ready “to meet the Lord.”  For Anthony, as Bosch paints him—holy book in hand, his judgment glaring out at us—it is nearly impossible to be “a good man.”  There is nothing else to do but for Anthony to “beg God to cauterize him with an electrifying heavenly burst / that incinerates all evidence of balls and phallus.”

From the point of view of Moss’s speaker, whom I believe we can take to be a woman (though it is not necessary we do so), Anthony’s vision suggests that “it is best not to be a man at all,” that “men can’t be any better / than they are right now.”  Their “roots” are beastly and men are “no better than “pigs” or “dogs.”  At least, the speaker concludes, given the incorrigible state of men, there is some “chance for humility.”

–Jack