Critics & Criticism

A Poem by A. V. Marraccini

We have declared love to be vestigial;
We have made our upper lips stiff cordons.
We shuck every oyster with a ritual,
That to each, a pearl is so apportioned.

We told Truth that she was an easy lay;
In the third person we took up baccarat,
And only someone else’s fortune play
Out on the felted tables, the patois
 
Of the comfortable only ceasing
When having slipped her blindfold’s knot,
Justice takes the player’s throat releasing
The jugular only at this upshot:

Chips all in, Critic, bet your bleating heart,
The stakes were always this: always thus, the art.

The Critic, Gabriel von Max, c. 1900