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Posts Tagged ‘ekphrasis’

A Dozen New Views

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 1, 2014| 1 Comment »

after looking long at Joseph Cornell’s Untitled assemblage (“The Hotel Eden”)

take the center
out of the spiral, it is
still a spiral

*

this list
of things to do—
not one word legible

*

after you set me free
holding my own leash
between my teeth

*

directions to Eden—
! but the starting point
has been rubbed away

*

inside a world
another world with another
world inside

*

waiting for the world to tip,
this motionless yellow ball

*

what if the frame
just fell off, how might we
see each other then

*

a jar full of unidentified things—
shall we open it?

*

so may places for the eye to land
so many places to gather dust
so little impulse to dust them

*

where would we be
without the diagonal—
one boring box after another

*

it will never fly away,
this green bird, still watching
the spring that will never
be sprung

*

perhaps this bird knows
what I have been trying to learn
there is nowhere
but here
to arrive

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Reframe After a Visit to the Chicago Art Institute

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 4, 2013| 4 Comments »

Notice, says the docent,
how the slash of flesh
creates a diagonal across the canvas.

This creates movement,
he explains, makes the painting
dynamic, more alive.

The slash is Jesus. His naked body
is clearly not alive. His blood
has stilled inside the pale skin.

The people around him
wear the pink stain of anguish,
behind them the sky skews toward black.

After forty four years,
I have never seen a dead body
unaltered by a mortician.

This is a fact aided by luck,
a small family, and a national obsession
with pushing death away.

Every hour, 6,319 people die.
Every minute, 105. Every second,
1.8. Excluding natural disasters.

Though it would be more polite
to say that 1.8 people passed.
Or 1.8 people breathed their last.

Or that 1.8 people departed.
Though since you started to read
this poem, over 60 people have

died, no matter what we call it.
All this perhaps explains why today
I noticed so many things

on the diagonal. The mountains,
of course. The sloping bangs
on the face of the girl. The tilt

of your voice as you greeted me.
The wine as it agreed with the angle
of the tipping glass. I noticed them because

I only this week learned have learned to notice the angle
of things, and perhaps because I am learning, too,
to notice the false guarantees.

On days such as these, I wake
and think, my god, what a gift to wake up,
what a windfall, this cold floor,

this dark of the morning
before the sun leans through the dark
to slant its faraway light into our room.

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