To Contain

,

.

Inarticulate, the open

of the cup, the space

we could call the cup’s mouth,

the hole the teacup creates.

It is the inner struggle

of the cartoon hero,

the blank face of the virgin

in the laminated prayer card,

how we equate the body

to the rhetoric of the body.

When you speak

about pain there is no pain,

only talking about pain

as the pain continues

like the tedium

of power lines.

~

I am holding two brass bowls in my hands.

I am holding three white vases in my hands.

We’ll pick up each thing that contains

& place them on a plane & say still life,

say catalog number.

After this we will say still life

& the people will say still life & repeat.

When we say world we can point

at the melody as it repeats.

Everything means less

than zero, which is one

starting point for understanding

how art responds to moral error with melody.

~

One can say X should never happen.

Torture should never happen.

But if it does happen, if it has always happened,

does it mean anything to say X should never happen?

There are three white bottles

in front of three boxes.

Or there is a shape of white paint

that means box to me

in front of a patch of darker paint

that means bottle to me.

And there is another & then another.

Things grow nocturnal on some nights

& on other nights the streetlights

have been on forever

like the strung-on melodies of pain.

~

The brushstroke is one record

of a life in the moment, the thumbprint

left on the glass vase waits

for an eye or a smudging cloth.

To the cloth it does not matter if the thumb

belonged to a murderer or a saint,

if the flowers that the vase once held

were well watered or forgotten into wither.

A single hair falls to the floor

beneath the easel & that is the body.

Protest is one way of hearing

one’s own voice. Just as complaint

is a way to remind oneself

that the individual fails

to contain more than the individual.

In this version the body simply blocks.

It is something to be pushed by or burned.

In the end, it’s just a white vase.

~

The morning after catastrophe

the people crawl out of their shelters

& find cups & bowls & fill them

& drink from them, or not.

There is wilderness & then there is pattern.

Two hands arise from the darkness

& pluck your earrings from your ears.

In one version there is no difference

between a face & a face-shaped block.

The water in the bathtub could be

unspooled tape from old cassettes.

Everything would be either

all-verse or all-chorus.

A man rises from his spot below the elm

& shakes out his blanket

& suddenly the twilight air

is thick with dust.

The red & blue candles on the metal shelf,

each labeled by a different virgin,

are only candles, truly, when lit.

~

Virgin of sorrows.

Virgin of quietude.

Virgin of unmarred blocks of marble.

Virgin of a boy fixing dinner

while mother lies awake in the bedroom.

Virgin of thickly felt.

Virgin of empty tabletops.

Virgin of horizons.

Virgin of the abscess in the marble.

Virgin of the abscess in the marble,

into which a teenager sticks

his green chewing gum.

Virgin of a white sheet of paper.

Virgin of the hole in the earlobe.

Virgin of cupped hands.

Virgin of the black bowl filled with still water.

Virgin of open spaces.

Virgin of holes.

Virgin of that which makes a hole.

~

You can open your mouth & presume

to become a teacup.

But when you open your mouth

you feel blank domino tile, tenderly.

What was the first thing

that looked like

what its word meant?

I think it was my name.

Rage. It fills the holes

that come into being

during a life lived

among the smeared ink & gore.

My name is rage

& you have always called

me education.

The visions come at unexpected times

if I do not continue to paint them.

Art cannot imitate the way networks of nature do.

Art is limited to experience, which happens

in one tense. Three white bottles

in front of three brown boxes.

~

But just as the white vase implies a space

the lines in the paint were made by horsehair brushes

which imply the existence of a horse

that ate things & stood with its feet on the ground.

This was a retrospective show,

to contain a story about the artist.

Brett & Cindy were there at the Met with me

stepping slowly from one painting to the next.

Daniella & Dan were there & Julia was there.

People I will never know were all there

& many more have been there since I was there.

Soon the building will be abandoned

& will fall into disrepair & the humans

will be gone & other animals & plants

will live among the marble ruins

that had once contained a building.

I cannot see through a person.

I can only see the space they occlude.

The space inside the smile is filled

with blood & other things I cannot understand.

Yet I could nick a thick vein

& collect their blood

in a brown hat, or a white teacup

& in the open air it would

eventually congeal into a solid red thing

or perhaps kind of red-brown.

~

These are some things that I think are true:

the face is a container; the space inside the skin is the self;

the body is a form in space; the self is unavailable beyond the form of the body.

Remove the skin, the flesh, the bone

& look for the self inside the body.

Every person lives for a specific amount of time.

When a person is dead you can finally understand them

as a plane, rather than a wilderness.

~

Morandi said, “I have never intended

to give the objects in my still life arrangements

any particular familiar meanings.”

When I look at the horizon

it does not mean in a familiar way.

It means inevitably. It means how drops of blood fall

toward the center of the earth. The way birds

don’t know that flying is terrible.

It is inarticulate, the space

that the cup creates.

The way three white vases on a plane

make the plane a horizon.

~

The red candle

with the label on which

the virgin is drawn

in brusque black lines

used to sit on the metal shelf

& now sits on my wooden table.

I want to light the wick.

And I want to keep the wick unlit.

The glass bottle holds

the red wax. The label holds

the virgin. The virgin holds

the meaning. And the white wick,

like a fetal finger, holds

the candle.

~

Place a teacup on a plane

& the wilderness shifts

into brushstrokes.

Dirt becomes earth, becomes form

& there are fingerprints

remaining on the skin of the clay

after the pitcher

is removed from the kiln.

A long blonde hair sticks

to the medieval tapestry.

The still water in the black bowl

contains my idea of myself.