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Never one
of my strong
suits, eloquence. Think
of a fence. Either bricks
or blocks, laid
square, or wooden
palings, up & down.
Nailed. Cemented.
Everything in its
pre-planned place. Not
like that for me. I look
for stones, with shapes
that match & inter-
act when placed
contiguous or even
at a distance from.
Something to run
your hand across & feel
irregularities, perhaps
seen smooth at distance
but up close catch
the breath, cut the
fingers with their rough-
hewn balance. Strong
enough to bind,
to keep the dogs
from running
on the road.
Some place in — is it? —
North Africa or southern
Italy, where, in the physical
absence of Giorgio de Chirico —
though his influence is every-
where — the moon is over-
seeing a game of pétanque.
A great play is made, but
only the stairs rise up to
applaud. No one else is here
to see it: the mannequins
& bilboquets have all gone
off to bed. Where they toss
& turn, the moon too bright.
Position is everything.
That's why this stone
bird can only fly above
a stony landscape. Place
it over water & it would
fall & sink. Is shown in an-
other painting that it's birds
made from the air which
have all the advantages.
You have blank walls. I have
four baby turtles with painted
backs that arrived at Dulles
International Airport earlier
this month. So, let's start with
room use. As in: "What do you want
to use the space for?" &: "What
do you want it to say about you?"
The topiary of doorways
renders them ambiguous.
A surfeit of entrances. Few
ways out. Enter, & risk
entrapment. Otherwise?
Follow the line. It may end
in sunlight or continue on
until night captures it. There is
a difference between mazes
& labyrinths. A pattern
to one, the other full of
doors that are not closed
until you try to open them.
A passage is the space
between two doors. The space
is hope. The doors despair.
In the narrows the sun
wests. Alligators hotfeet it
for the nearest spa. The delta
stretches, rolls over onto
its back to burn its belly
& better hear the zydeco
band that bubbles by. We
spoke of foodchains, &
whether it was the
resumption of whaling
that had driven the cliff-
dwellers out of the pueblos.
He paused, pleasured by
a point he'd made, & pride
blind-sided him. The
peristaltic erudition of a
passing manatee swallowed
him up in easy pieces. Mean-
while the moon blooms
miserly in the yellows.
Botticelli lives in the ground-
floor flat. Most of the time
you hardly know he's there
except for those days when
Venus emerges, pauses, poses
on the welcome mat & a host
of classical gods & dryads &
nymphs & cherubim come
gathering around. Which, of
course, brings a crowd of mere
mortals. Half of whom continue
to gaze, & half of those think
something nefarious is going on,
& half of those think it might be
a porn video being made, & half
of them contact the police, & half
of those . . .& half . . . & ha . . . &
somewhere in the madding crowd
is a dude who's catching it all on
cell phone & dreaming of a You-
Tube video called Proving Zeno's
Paradox, & is busy looking round
for a tortoise to give that touch of
authenticity & frisson to the piece.
Here there are no judges'
chairs that turn around.
Rather, in a somewhat
hyperactive nod to Botticelli,
it is the the whitecaps that
rage & foam. A symbiotic
frenzy. They give energy
to her knowing that she'll
give it back to them when
she emerges full-grown
from this half-hell. The am-
bience is pure de Chirico
punk, whether pre- or post-
apocalyptic one is never
quite sure. Is augmented by
Magritte's props which are
stacked up ready to take
their places when later called
upon. Mirrors, & doors with
holes cut in them — a way
through a way through, a
different way of seeing. &
the idol herself, un bilboquet
désarmé which allows her fingers
free range to trace the template
she poises on. Is there enough
humanity within this segment
sliced from human simulacrum to
allow her to progress, given that
the stairs go neither up nor down?
Somewhere, sometime, I took
this Ingres figure out of con-
text & painted around the
space that remained. That's
how I felt at the time: caught
up with inference & reference,
seeking to highlight what was-
n't there. I've moved on, have
decided to return & fill the
spaces once again, not with
the figures seen by antiquity but
as if they came from the circus
or commedia dell'arte — the clowns,
the dancing bears, the harlequins.
The latest collection of my Magritte poems.
Available as a free downloadable pdf here.
Available for purchase as a print book here.
