A Gorgeous Paw Philip Guston Never Saw
And there’s the part of an evening
when you are in Sibiu, speaking
to a shadow as local honeysuckle
pours over a door frame to eavesdrop
like Philip Guston falling in love
with a line because there is no such thing
as accident or being erratic, and no such
scent in the shape on the sidewalk.
The part where the ocean parts
unerringly as Kafka parted
his black hair down the center,
dividing his head in half
to meet the part of you whose
hair is very black, too. Blackest
midnight. At the roots.
A part that has nothing to do
with anything but the sensation
of a mistake Guston would follow.
He’d follow through. And maybe the
ocean vanishes when you run out of blue.
Maybe a line is the sound blue assumes
when someone misses you. The vowels
of your name clattering like hooves
over the cobblestones of Sibiu.
Was it worth it? The vine. The echo.
The rhyme. The error swallowed
and chewed. What did you do for the image
you’ve always wanted to see, the sweetness
of the paw attached to a snake, an
undulation you can’t return to the world
without the weight of representation.
The Missing Self-Portrait of Saint Sebastian
In 1914, Frank Kafka told his diary
that he’d been asked to pose nude “as a model
for a St. Sebastian” by an artist named Ascher.
But nothing came of it. There is no record
of such a painting ever being made—
though I have often imagined it,
taking it upon myself to visualize the sharp
characteristic middle part that slices
the inscrutable blankness of his expression
in half. Blasted with purloined laughter,
buried in letters, the come-hither
yet to come in the fountain and the frost;
the words betray the balm of the thought.
Nevertheless, I have thought it
with diligence in a garden and a notebook
surrounded by sunshine and shitty beer.
I have done the work of imagining
with mine eyes and mine ears
the gall forbidden, the wall unbidden,
the slither of the hither in the bridge.
[Quoted words come from Kafka’s diary entry dated January 1912, which reads: “I am
supposed to pose in the nude for the artist [Ernst] Ascher, as a model for a St. Sebastian.” This
poem is also in dialogue with John Donne’s poem, “Twickenham Garden.”]
Si tu / Și tu / în situ
In French, si tu means “if you”; in Romanian, și tu means “and you.”
Mallarme told Paul Claudel he wanted
to write a poem titled “Si Tu” — and so
you do. Maybe the simplest thing is titling
if you listen to Shostakovich’s Tenth, legs trembling
as the monstrous develops from within
the march towards greatness. And if you
manage not to inch when you hear the abyss
in the concert hall’s faces — if you recognize
the interrogator’s grin in the ashes of a fresh
interrogation, the executioner of the dissident
is your brother, the third gun of the shooting squad
is your uncle and you are the statue near the water
who weeps for the terrorist in the garden
where no chord can aspire to innocence.
Maybe the simplest thing is the frame
if you buried the unopened letter – if you
have been the unbearable signature, the sin
in Donne’s spider, Valery’s serpent, Rilke’s falling
angel trapped in an angle of light, blinded by
the hand that holds you aloft, denounced by the sky
who misreads you —you you you who has been wrong
yet cannot stop returning to photos of the composer
whose fingers barely touched the cigarette he smoked
as if to kiss the breath he held back. And you
who tasted it. You who knows and who knew the hue
of the candle, the way the body leans into the lack
of a lighter after losing a match, the writer
using anything to keep the pen moving through glass
that the music holds captive.
Maybe the best is unconceived, yet barely true
if you are still lost in the silk of his secret
sonata, the unspoken in each
unspeakable, the unconditional
denied by the conditional. Listesso tempo.
And you. The symphony’s subject
is the reactive surface who cannot abandon
the search for a savior in Benjamin’s suitcase.
