Mastery
I don’t think I’ll make it,
I said after the article about
Alex Katz turning 95—not just
painting, he’s spry enough to
climb ladders to reach
all corners of his radiant
canvases. Not like Brice
Marden, wheelchair-bound
at 83, but even he unspooled
his luminous calligraphy
into sublime ghost loops.
Serena Williams pirouettes
within her clay court
after acing chartreuse
down the white sidelines.
The rectangle prevails
and there seems little reason
to break the frame. I stand
under the wide, blue sky
next to my father’s grave,
a wood coffin sealed
in a metal vault, and know—
what? Not much.
The grass is shorn mute.
The family of wild turkeys
nowhere to be seen.
Brice says, “people claimed
painting was dead. It was
my way of showing what
can be done.” Before he died,
Edward Hopper finished
a last portrait—he and his wife,
spot lit. The stage
around them, dissolved . . .
no ceilings, no walls, nothing
except darkness: black
underpainted sky blue and
leaf green, like woods
at midnight, just before
the new moon.
Idyll
I’m camping in a body I’m recycling
as I speak. Skin cells scatter around
my feet like pollen, silicone spheres
flower behind irises. Impregnated with
Vitamin E, my titanium femur
nests within the old bony socket.
My limbs evolve into strange phantom
parts—. I can not quite understand
I can not return to the figure
I was. I’m caught in a peculiar blend
of artifice and armor. I trusted
gravity had it in for all of us,
but a cloud doesn’t always float
down, like bird song lifts and swirls
above our heads. And anyway,
isn’t gravity simply warped space?
I’m ok with falling up.
