I. Untitled (Bolsena), 1969
Mostly industrial paint on canvas,
it does not describe the background's retreat
from numbers inscribed in blue and red crayon
or graphite's linear insistence on canvas.
The squares, filled or empty, smudged and swiped,
lack the dignity of archived insects
and offer no suggestion of consequence
or history's tragicomic swipes.
But it does have the look of sand after a storm,
calm after the wind's bullwhippings, fragged
with litter and seaweed and still resistant,
before the digger bees dig in, before ant tunnels
open with minor cave-ins and broken scuttles,
when a hermit crab's cartographic, seizured path
—from here to there, from there to there—
forgives its borders like a forgotten city,
when sounds return to the bodies that make them
and the sea repeats the simple statement: I am
the clock of broken cogs and loosened springs.
The numbers never tire of being counted,
persisting where the background loses interest.
The lines would seem to prefer a different math,
one more gestured, if they were counted.
Like the incumbent swells of the sea
on days when the moon is right, it is . . .
it is spare in intentions, optimistically obtuse,
and it holds a gaze well. Do you not hear the sea?
II. Untitled, 1972
NEVER BE THE SAME capsizes the canvas
from the lower right, though WILL retreats
behind paint unskillfully palming the crayon—
or is the medium there pencil? The canvas,
largely garrotted by cerulean and white swipes,
engages other colors like an intruding insect—
burnt siena, yellows of slight consequence
on chromium green—splattered with a swipe.
Expect more than obliquery. THE SECRETS
THAT FALL, written on the picture, cannot
translate other charcoaled words as modest
as an evening in, windows open, the blinds
pulled halfway up and turned down, thunder
elsewhere telling there'll likely be rain soon—
the division of here by there, as eager to please
as discalced heretics, on pilgrimage to nowhere
—and then the wind, overcharged, orchestrates
like an idle day the coming storm smell, drops
already, too intimately, spattering the sills.
It's important not to focus on what can be counted:
various straight lines, handwriting's implicit interest
over what seems an indifferent yet calculated math.
Few things deceive better than what can be counted.
Variegated tones of blue lend it a look of the sea,
but a single wave in the midst of its collapse is
hardly something to discount or label obtuse—
Take it away, and what would become of the sea?