kerchoo

In Naishapur did Khaibar Khan With stately ease exclaim 'Kerchoo!' And Standard Oil dispatched its man With bales of linen to Iran To minister unto his flu ...

There's also kerchoo (Joan Heilbruner's Robert the Rose Horse, 1962); ka-choo (Rosetta Stone's Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo, 1975); ka-chow (James Flora's The Day the Cow Sneezed, 1957); and atishoooooooooo (Ruth Brown's The Big Sneeze, 1985).

And where else are health briefs combined with reminders of one's own mortality: "Flu hits T-town hard/ Should have got your shots sooner/ Soon you will be dead." And that's nothing to sneeze --haiku kerchoo -- at.

Despite the usual reading of the pope's open mouth as a sign of existential nausea - universal scream on the order of Edvard Munch's famous image - I always read it, in the Vassar version with which I was familiar at any rate, Study for Portrait, IV, 1953, as a sneeze, which reduced the papal being, or rather, Velazquez's famous image of Innocent X, to a modern photo-op, the pope's partially covered mouth agape in a vigorous and nonexistential kerchoo. In Bacon's portrait, temporal immediacy and mere physical reflex wittily undermine the pictorial effects of hierarchy and permanence.