The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow

No better illustration

Of how imagination

(Which is to say, memory,

That angel) gives life to art,

Than Brueghel’s Adoration

With its leafless trees, new snow

Falling, the bundled shadows

Of human figures, buildings

With chimneys, roofs, and angles,

All reminding you or me

Of similar things we’ve seen.

So we see them. But it’s weird.

There’s a god in the corner

From an era neither we

Nor the painter quite conceived.