for Barnett Newman, Abstract Expressionist
Painter & Frank O'Hara, great American Poet
Two seasons upon your forehead, Love.
Horizon of your brow now tilts toward sunset.
Stratus clouds lift above the
major line, parallel but with telemetry
of their own -
symmetry shifts, music
notes stretched flat on the scale.
'Below all this your eyes two suns setting'
though it is redundant to say so,
a poemline tracing horizon, what
lies behind it/below we leap or can,
happily, to mental verticals see distant
stars which orient us as specks just
as they are specks.
We lay together, two wrecks, Love,
wooden ships conjoined by forces
too great, too objective to blame.
We stretch beside a shoreline,
eels play in the one rib of our opened
selves, our rarer fingers gesture to
horizon up to stars, even Sun, Moon,
entwine before and behind centering
a presumably expanding circumference
curving inwardly toward itself which
is an affection, a longing, a bottom
upon which even G-D can lay hidden
from secret admirers such are mirrors
whose surfaces are rarely breached.
But there is reach,
many ways to say the word 'love'
which, redundant to say, sparks
and we are returned to some notion
Platonic beyond higher mathematics
of over-said,
over-reached
'Infinity'
of which Barnett Newman spoke to
Frank O'Hara, rather, about 'the
Void' -
can the word bear a capital?
may the word bear a capital? -
his fear of it, 'discomfort'
to be accurate, not knowing that
Frank would be in it(Void) not
so far from the saying of it, the
beach that hot day so I have read
was crowded though Frank had chosen
a voided spot to lay down and sun
upon when the dune buggy ran over
his tanned radiance, his broken nose
his brilliance, that Chariot of the
Sun Eclipse, it's job done, fated,
fell forward into the 'wine sea',
NOT, thank god, an 'anHomeric'**
Riesling, as did Frank's soul,
cherry dark, an Amarone most homophone
he may have until then denied/tried,
or at least decried/died trying to
name it (the soul) which became a
starfish painted, say, by Cy T(womby)
pronounced 'zombie' though 'womby'
works as image which dead mariners
make wishes upon/within.
As do we wish.
I wish you, Love, beyond/within
all Voids - is the Void one or
plurality? - a painter on the
near shore to paint what we
have become. One (he must be)
beautiful, a man, radiant, who
raises his thumb to rearrange
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^the horizon^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
***********************************************the sky*****
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~the moving line~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~'undulant'
of the sea where we without
breadth heave each our separate
selves and each other into
squint ashore promontory, one
eye to gauge/allow a thumb's
up by any other intent
acknowledgement of worth
perceived:
'Though they are all white with black and grey scoring,
the range is far from a whisper, and this new development
makes the painting itself the form.
'A bird seems to have
passed through the impasto with cream-colored screams and
bitter clawmarks.' - O'Hara about Cy Twomby's paintings
Waves, wayward clocks (become)
adrift migrant birds, scores, always
cry at the unending feast.
We are not the least of those
but know ourselves too beyond
bondage to time which is to say
hunger in spite of rhythm.
Love, let us live without
rhyme
the sun go up and
down,
the Sky-Amor-Wheel-Fati turn
and return with feeling
Let the painter lonely be
alone pinned to shore with
his paints, his brushes,
his thumb-gauged vision
in relation to ourselves
without rhyme trued,
true to ourselves.
Nature, too, is true.
May he use the color blue.
Carelessly.
Tubes of it.
We once were that, too -
careless without.
Now wrecks.
Vaulted. Now become weather
without forehead, without
cloudneck
Vastness
in the making
(if such
is made at all)
but is aporetic
euphoric
a condition,
a given hard
thumb against
a sky of tubes and
squints made
we are then a
'striving after'
beyond cream-colored
foam/form
Here come the proud birds again
+++++++++++++
**anHomeric - a nonexistent word combined of 'anhedonic' which means 'against pleasure' and the name of the great Greek poet, Homer, thus the word 'anHomeric'