Portrait Through Paintings

Radishes and green peppers and goldenrod

rendered precisely, so each petal is edible

and the image is sort of a salad on a wheelbarrow

in which the artist

indulges herself or is suggesting that

nature arranged geometrically in a garden

is worth contemplation by the sheer abundance

of detail, 

                 or a self-portrait with rectilinear cheeks

and a glass jaw that has never been broken but hangs

not defiantly but with a see-through

assurance that here is its proper wall and though

the fixtures circulate in numerous directions

and he is not unwilling to cooperate to the point

of effacement, for the moment everything

is aboveboard and fathomable, and for that

he is thankful.

                           Or the elongated etching

with brown water and unemotional stones

that neither denies nor asserts nor devotes itself

to an expenditure of necessity

but hangs inaudibly like a cocktail dress

that was displayed, admired, and forgotten. 

The landscape is immaculate, as are the 

people who were pasted up in a priori positions—

as if to investigate their employment were a kind

of heathen activity that preordained

them to dysfunction. Not inaccurate,

for their limbs are set at correct angles and each

is identifiable in his function, yet

lacking in organs that make even the simplest

of outlines a human commitment. 

                                                               Or the office interior

with classical corners and starched woodwork where

the blue-suited executive ponders his budget,

his hands raw with exclusion, his eyes rampant,

as he scuffles internally to stand still.

To a Poet (Such as Myself) Writing a Poem on a Painting

            It stands still long enough
and requires no commitment.
The sea shanties and the stone bridge
and the striated evenings
that burn black in the hills
are not illusions, nor does the oak bending
indefinitely have words that are human
and wounded. You can gain solace
from the zinc-green inferences of the river,
but the stiff passages that seem glued
to the surface and suggest cruelty
are depictions of the light.
The wind rummages through the alders,
and the near hysteria of the leaves
where the branches stall
and fork downward is fallow
and as random as the clouds.
            You seek doorknobs
on the crust of a rainbow,
but the plaited forefingers
of the washerwomen who couple
harmoniously with the water
are almost lost in the glaze.
Equivocal like a cluster of stems, 

they mean more to you than intended . . .
the swollen inlet
that wheezes around the skiffs
and cakes mud on the morning
is a shallow blue.
            You glance down the ridges . . .
the broad dabs of sunlight
and gray horizon
are the hours of deception
where the minutes lose impact
and settle like dewdrops on their bonnets.
            Nothing is discomforted,
nothing displaced.
You move in and out like the dust,
you speak cleverly . . .
the round nuances
that disturb no one
and are preternatural
in their attachment to color
have events of their own.
The wall, where the falloff
levels out from the corners
and declines to keep still,
is too material and earthbound,
like the paint, and requires one's presence.
It lacks line and has a way
of sagging beyond your intentions.


(This poem first appeared in 
The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.)

Infant Crying

Your wounded bird cry

at the base of each morning—

a stone tower rising upward, upward—

your two-foot-long body a plastic rattle,

it seems to me almost your infinitely small limbs

will snap off and fall to the floor.

A rubber doll with the thinnest of thin hair,

your mouth open and red like the fruit

of the hawthorn, the capillaries of your

blotched face about to explode . . .

there is light shining through you.

My skin winces when I enter your room. The efforts

of your nut-sized lungs is exhausting, frightening,

your whole body vibrating like an idling car.

An egg on my finger tips, a porcelain cup,

a goldfinch in the palm of my hand, bird

without feathers, my arms walk of their

toes when they near you. It took time to learn

you were durable, you would last.

Already you sense the ends of your body,

where something else is beginning.

Flashes, screeches, the infinite input, the walls

splitting around you . . . nothing responds.

Where there are arms, you cry. Where there are none,

you are silent.

Your fingers clench and open, clench and open.

You are the quince on the table

the coat in the closet. You were not born

for yourself. Ornament and machine,

you define but you lack definition.

I flap heroically at the confused dog

who sniffs at my nest. But the cat is more

difficult, more decisive. Its claws are immense,

beyond my understanding.

A nipple shrinks as it enters your mouth.

Your gums pucker and throb. You sense my

bewilderment, all bewilderment. We are existing

on each other's need.

Piglet, saliva bubbling from between your lips,

I smell your head like a flower.

I kiss it—a thousand times.

At night I lie on my back, my knees propped upward,

I lie there, awake, perpetually,

your parakeet heart thumping on the sides of my head.

(This poem appeared in Prairie Schooner.)

Surfaces

Doesn't matter how well you've lived

or if you've lived at all.

There is no realism, only abstraction.

Reduced to its simplicity,

life can be immeasurable,

life can be nothing.

Nature is abstract,

so's work.

You focus and you see nothing.

I like swatches of color,

shapes. I like violence.

I don't know what I know.

I'm about to, but I lose it.

Just as well. Defying death is absorbing,

lonely. I hate to be lonely.

I walk inside myself, get lost,

meet strangers who insist on talking.

I talk, too—to know if I have substance.

I don't. I have torn pants,

sneakers that are worn out.

I use Vitapointe on my hair.

I stroll through the woods,

take photographs of lichen, fungi,

have a close-up of a frog.

I separate likenesses, record them,

forget them, avoid mystery because

there is so much.

I open the sealed letter, peruse it,

pass it on to others.

The future comes anyway.

It walks through me, around me,

produces children who inhabit it,

grow up, try not to be me.

(This poem appeared in The Virginia Quarterly
Review.)

Intaglio

A violent arsenal. 

Make slashes that resemble natural

phenomena, add stress to its hard, linear clarity.

So exhilarated, I etch lines in the air,

slice through the hot wax on copper,                     

condense my disordinary anger—inarguable, undimensional,

yet rampant, yet me.

Wreaking indignity, immersed in the acid bath, bitten.

Then darkness, then image, then ink funneled

through the incised veins. Red streaks only the quick eye

can digest—not revel in but alert others to. Danger in the

metal, the inedible edges, the flesh so easily scored and

transposed only surface seems evident. But then, in                     

the unadorned evening, the surface, inarticulate as a button,

reaches out and presents me with what I’ve suspected of

myself, 

and for that second I am not the amethyst of 

revelation, not sacrifice, not lust, not intent, without 

passage, but singular, but living. This blood, this mien, 

this face, thinned out to the 

immaculate, its eye, its curves, undulating in unsavory 

        directions, irritating, unresolved . . . recall me, forget me, 

the endurance . . . “what are we worth when motionless . . . .”

Arriving where I was not going—like St. Exupéry—

I dine, I sleep, I leave—my flight through resistance, through

the thunder, to “the peace of the kingdom of silence.”

Progeny

Sun Birth

When the camel bustled on a red desert, unfamiliar

as I am with its stench, its knobbed knees splayed

inward like my Leah's, who born in a manager, my trinity,

my daughter, her red hair in the winter when the coin

spun and came up heads, the sumptuous juices

of a da-da who giggled on the sand where the camel

bore me and borne me, no twizzlers from my teenhood

that arrived later, if ever, could equal this immortal.

Not merely an approximation but the good

gold of copper that wraps her in her honeyness, in her aureole,

the perfect invasion of the imperfect earth, the one-

two of creation that rippled through the still waters

of the coming that came not but came here,

my fissure in the cruel corpus of this caulked planet.

17

The one-two contestant to my title, my Sam,

unratcheted, unburnished, the goo-goo tooth

who grew tall, my maple replacement whose cheek,

bearded like a man, I kiss hourly and equal,

face to face with my face, we talk hours

like the clouds, his eyes an everyman in this slaughter,

his dew desire a wreath of F majors,

a rhododendron on the rat-a-tat-tat on the door.

No Kol Nidre of suffering here

but the feather firsts of to be and I am, the one

son of my sum-up I savor like the berry I was rarely,

was perhaps once to my father who fathered a father

in this rabid container called day where the undeath

of the dead is brought fragrant by my Sam and my Sam.

My White Teeth

I take my teeth out of my mouth every evening

and soak them in a filthy  blue plastic container

the dentist

gave me. I suppose I should show some

pride in my mouth and marinate them in a ceramic

pot where they can sprout gums and perhaps

become

part of my anatomy. Right now they're amazingly

alien to me, an occupant of my mouth, as if I were

eternally sucking on an acorn.

A primitive device

that allows me to chew. I would like to extract

them from my face one morning on the

bus

I take from Upper Montclair to the city

so all the lawyers could see them and puke.

I'm estranged from my own ass.

What's wrong with me? I perpetually

feel

like a foreign object. I can take my teeth out

and it seems to me I should be able to remove

my fingers and put my dick in the refrigerator.

I suppose that's why I was a

revolutionary

for five years—not because I wanted to change the world

but because no part of me was connected to anything.

I sit on the bus alienated not only from the

passengers,

from the driver, but from the bus itself—

I expect it to spit me out—I'm amazed it stops

for me every morning and allows me

aboard.

I have to rearrange myself better—cut my hair,

iron my jeans, wear a clean shirt.

Oh, I can get up in the morning, insert my teeth, get

dressed,

go to work—I can even chat with my boss,

whom I despise more than my teeth.

But what am I? I long for sensation, not experience,

not travel—sensation—to feel the unusual, to feel.

What am I talking about here? I wanted to write something

with structure,

like my teeth, something I could chew with,

but so what? Everyone rambles nowadays and

becomes famous. I'm reading Frank O'Hara and he

rambles,

but I suppose he's famous because

of his exotic death—sort of like Sylvia Plath.

Today I went to the Modern to see Robert Ryman.

I was looking at slides of paintings of buildings—

they

were so precisely done, they depressed me.

They reminded me of my teeth. I needed

to see something indefinite, something

about suicide.

Ryman's white canvases, his aluminum

panels, his baked enamel potholders—

is the world so minimal I can barely

find something to hold onto? But I wasn't

depressed. I said, "There goes my century,

even if I wasn't part of it."

Everyday is an execution. I queue up for the

bus obediently,

I keep my teeth in my mouth,

I thank the driver when I get off . . .

I'm that mechanical. If only it were a

philosophical problem—like dialectical materialism—

I could come up with a poetic

and

unusable solution to live by. But no,

it's something unnameable—like Ryman's paintings—

something minimal, nonnegotiable, inert,

painting the paint, he calls it,

a large surface with shades of white.



(This poem first appeared in the Journal of 
New Jersey Poets.)