Two by Tiepolo, both depicting cages.
In one the long-nosed Punchinello stares at a tiger
in a cage mounted on large wagon wheels. In Visiting
the Nunnery visitors in sixteenth-century Italian street dress
stare at the nuns who stand behind bars like quizzical
flamingos. Kafka’s hunger artist, too, in his strawed cage,
starving himself toward new, more emaciating records of
abstinence. But not just freaks, anomalies or outlandish
African animals. Everything now has the look, as Eliot