“Falling Man”

 Max Beckmann 

Naomi Shihab Nye

1

What made a man topple in one 

of Max Beckmann’s last paintings 

cannot now be remembered or described.

We could speculate –

he slipped. Something pushed him.

He was on the edge for years.

He was all of us, don’t even try.

If we had asked what was going on in days before,

he might have replied, Nothing, as children say

mournfully, once they’ve started school.

Or perhaps, I tried to leap beyond the fires

to save myself. Soaring into infinity,

some think, or a foretaste of the future,

but we see a man deep dive to his demise.

Buildings on both sides roar

from within, curtains, plants,

shivering flames, gulping

every inch of what was a room.

Smoke roils thickly around his plunging feet.

Beckmann could make smoke be clouds,

be thoughts, the weight of tangled dream.

These large sturdy feet might almost be 

striking a dance pose. But they are upside down.

Consider everywhere they walked, and the man’s 

large capable hands, but what use? 

A black wheel hovers to the left, he doesn’t grab it,

Beckmann’s wife called it a balcony

from a strange angle,

but our man is past steering or pausing.

Airplanes, boats,

hopeful means of travel,

float in the background, sky

merging with sea.

Once our man went places and returned.

He walked as a human –

no need for speed. 

One plunge and all that’s left are 

flashing streams of thought --

in a moment to be gone?

But are they gone?

2

“Stop,” she said. My mother would not 

let me read aloud the final chapter of her 

Beckmann biography because she knew

what happened in it. After all he had witnessed,

suffered, to move to St. Louis,

two happy years in a calm studio, an art school,

inspiring lives... her paintings look 

like his. He called her his most “simpatico” student. 

She didn’t know the word. To me this seems 

the greatest gift one might ever receive. 

But she tells me only when she is dying.

People fell in German, Spanish, Arabic,

all over the world people fell, in the wars,

in the dark alley she’d grown up in, before art

encircled and held her so she didn’t hit the ground. 

Soaking in something not yourself was the way free,

expanding the mind, letting art be your compass,

your glide.
My mother could not bear to feel her 

dearest teacher step out for a morning walk

across Central Park and fall.

His wife Quappi wrote

he was “freed of the horrors 

and beauties of life on earth.”

Swoops of oil remain. 

Complete as anthems. Mysterious as days.

3

Your child dies and 

you plummet off the roof too.

You will keep falling through

hours, months, anniversaries,

the unexpected thunder tilt of any moment

where he’s suddenly

standing in the door.

How precious, the door.

Or – his voice plunges

into your ongoing sorrow –

what he would have said. 

These little plaid pants. They traveled far

and weren’t new when he got them.

Where do they go?

What was going on inside 

you couldn’t know.

Who was steering the wheel. 

As a child, his future 

loomed, gleaming, gracious, 

long and bright as the sky behind 

everyone upright, bigger than you were.

He would outlive all you shared. 

But this will not be. 

Find comfort in the Falling Man

whose face we can’t see,

the mystery we’re stuck with,

the thick arms so much

like his own. We want to stand 

beneath the Falling Man

and catch him. Out walking, 

we feel boys walking alongside us,

girls too, and ancestors, and the man with the brush,

Max.

Speak to the flaming silence,

the endless regret, but remember things 

which do not plummet –

memory, color, love.

I should remember more than I do. 

I might have noticed more than I did. 

Beckmann’s turquoise slash of fabric,

Beckmann’s blue.