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Home>Stories>Poet Naomi Shihab Nye Responds to a Painting by Max Beckmann

Art in Focus

# Poet Naomi Shihab Nye Responds to a Painting by Max Beckmann

 min read

As part of our “Poetry is a country” festival we invited celebrated American poets to compose something new inspired by art in our collection. Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem responds to Max Beckmann’s *Falling Man*.

Falling Man

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.

 

Please note: We have tried to preserve the formatting of poems, but some devices may distort how text appears. Read the poem in its original formatting here.

Max Beckmann, *Falling Man*, 1950, oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Max Beckmann, 1975.96.3

Explore new creations by some of America’s most important living poets.Read more

Naomi Shihab Nye

Essayist, educator, and professor of creative writing at Texas State University.

August 28, 2023

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