Apocalypse Exhibition

“The Book of the Apocalypse”, a collection of paintings and artistically lettered biblical script in a sculptured binding collected by M. Foret: cover artist Salvador Dali: on show in London November 1972.

Stamps slapped onto the wall, great stamps, originals crowding the screens,
and guarded by globe, a tremendous first-day cover
of millionaire ecstatic humility:
a beggar-king, a filth of gold and bronze and nails,
forks, pearls, death, life, a shell of all the opposites.
And the stamps cascading a singing human madness
about the room. Horses are burning down,
nails slung, pinned, stuck. Here there is a human,
a split skull, a triumphant blitzed form;
and a wailing beast of five heads, the beast of the sea,
serenades a harpy circle of fighting batwings
of angels. A woman clothed in the sun
is by the side. A superman is born,
drowsed in a circle of strength and gentle limbs.
A lamb splits all the geometries we know
of so-called truth and moral senses.
The Word, resilient down
the crazed and rich diagonals of the room
prints our name man’s name and the death of Christ
in the gold that is also of the heart.
Continue
Christ, man, to look at and be new years of life,
and in the future when they see this book,
they will not think our stamps such petty things,
and they may praise – as men will do their children –
the blind, blunt and truthful river of glory
cast on the cover of the album.

Through a night-window then I looked, caught up
again in the dark-stoned evening, in the street.