More Than An Ear Can Hold - A Tryptic Poem Line Tracing Horizon For Painters And Poets Poem by Warren Falcon

for Cy Twombly, Barnett Newman, Frank O'Hara

'I never really separated painting and literature.' - Cy Twombly

'Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.'
- Barnett Newman

'... more than the ear can hold' - Frank O'Hara

1
Two seasons upon your forehead

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 poem line tracing horizon, what
lies behind it below we leap or
can, happily, to mental verticals

such are these birds
flying out to sea such is
this our land giving way
beneath all their push

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
share at last, gesture horizon
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 God
can lay hidden from secret admirers
such are mirrors whose surfaces
are rarely breached

2
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

math

of over-said,

over-reached

'Infinity'

beyond

the sea where we without
breadth heave each our
separate selves and each
other into, squint, a promontory
shear, one eye to gauge,
the other to allow a thumb's
scan by any other intent
acknowledgement
of worth perceived —

waves wayward
clocks (become)

adrift migrant birds, scores,
always crying at the unending feast

We are not the least of these
but know ourselves too beyond
bondage to time which is to say
'hunger' in spite of rhythm

3
Love, let us live without

rhyme


the sun go up the sun

go 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,

and Void, without intended

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

foreheads


without

cloudnecks


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 made


and of

squints made


Beyond cream-colored

foam/form

churned by storm

we are then a

'striving after'