My Art is a Phoenix

 

And so it is that in the history of art,

everything arises from loss,

tragedy, or unhappiness.

Art is a phoenix.

When was good art ever made from happiness?

Who works when they’re happy?

So this is the dilemma:

How to make art

and still be happy?

 

If the most vulgar transmission of knowledge

is the spoken word, then

the highest may be sitting in silence

without a word uttered between

student

(viewer, reader, seer, listener)

and master

(artist, God, teacher).

With that kind of communication,

an object between observer and observed

may be unnecessary.

To sit and contemplate

a leaf, a rock, a cloud,

it becomes possible to commune

with what is

without an intermediary.

Much like the concept of pure cinema,

the attempt to return to the medium’s

elemental origins,

feels nothing less than avant-garde.

 

God creates things

therefore, I create things

because it is in my DNA to do so.

God creates things for us.

Did you think he was doing this

for himself?

God is not self-absorbed,

he longs to share everything,

to have his creation seen,

heard, felt, smelt.

God, what an inadequate word

for thee supreme artist.

God, the very word tastes

medieval in the mouth.

 

An artist is appropriately possessed

and completely diseased by

creativity and ideas.

For that, he is willing

to sacrifice everything.

There will be pain.

Perhaps there must be pain.

 

How to live with pain

so that it strengthens and informs

and makes me more present

to the beatitude inherent in every moment?

Beauty is not an object apart from,

but a way of perceiving.

Is beauty beautiful

if no one’s there to perceive it?

Take that old chestnut:

Does a tree falling in the forest

make a sound if no one is there to hear it?

Is the sky at dawn spectacular

if we are fast asleep in our beds?

The world demands our attention

and beauty is spiritualizing.

That way we play a part in it.

It is connective.

Beauty is a vocation;

a calling I feel I must answer.

Otherwise,

I risk being a factory run by a tyrant,

a memory afraid to be erased,

a heart at odds with desiring,

a mouth without need for a face!

 

And finally,

of all the plants I planted in my garden,

what I did not plant has flourished the most.

Either seeds were hidden in the soil

or the wind carried a spore willy nilly

to my little plot of ground.

So often that’s how life feels.

I plant and sew and plan and then

something unexpected springs up

so easily on its own.

 

11/23/23

The Woman Who Knew All Too Well

(for Joan Valentina)

 

i

That her health was a soldier

too wounded to correspond.

That her body was in a lover’s quarrel

with an inopportune world.

That the simple act of walking

was to drag an anchor

across unforgiving ground.

That each breath she took

was a flower devoid of

its heavenly scent.

 

And so

this woman who knew all too well

has passed away.

 

ii

Though my life only brushed hers

like a moth grazing a bulb ablaze with light,

her absence has gnawed a hole

in the fabric of the world.

Aside from my lackadaisical interest

in the lives of others

I was no match for her uncanny radar,

nor could my faintly fractured mind

hold a candle to the bated breadth

of her insatiable curiosity.

I could only stand back and marvel

at her clever knack for discernment.

 

I would not be wrong to say

she knew a thing or two

about everything and everyone,

peering room by room through

a spy glass made for drawing down the stars.

 

I could see her apartment window from mine

and every now and then I’d glance

across and notice her scrolling the internet

in a lonely pool of light, her lamp

casting a theatrical spot

as if she were the sole star

in a bare bones production of her life.

That vacant light had caught my eye

as it had been on night and day

for weeks with her missing at the controls.

 

I wondered if she might be in hospital

knowing she would know if it were

the other way around.

I suddenly had the unsettling feeling

I might never see her again.

 

Though she was never

one to withdraw from the world,

her Lupis had lately gotten the best of her.

Even so, she would find ways to stay

on top of goings on,

even if by more subversive means.

Nothing could stop her desire to know.

 

Now I wonder,

where has all that knowing gone?

 

iii

Another’s death tilts the mind’s

tender machinery.

It simply does not compute

to be suddenly and irreversibly erased!

For the habitual problem solver,

resourcefulness is the highest religion.

 

It’s true I once described her as

tilting every room she entered

so that all roads led to her.

At a party, she’d speak

without a pause on any subject

as if from the axis of her

own personal wheel of fortune

with the inarguable voice

of lived experience.

The food she prepared.

The parts she played.

The clothes she wore.

The people she helped.

The stories she shared.

The problems she solved.

The paths she took.

 

Nothing escaped

her powers of observation.

She, the mystery solver.

She, the truth decoder.

She, the gossip monger.

She, the storyteller.

She, the advice provider.

She, the mentor

for finessing every room.

 

As I write this the morning after,

The Queen of Outer Space

is playing on TCM

and an unlikely thought presents itself:

How much world must we

hold inside ourselves

so as not to fade

when we are gone?

 

Maybe because she once said

I was her favorite poet,

I am left too numb

to do her justice

with a single line.

 

 

11/21/23

 

 

At Night in the House of My Body

 

There is only one language

and it’s prayer.

 

The gist is this:

Body, be my shelter.

Let me not impede

upon your sublimity.

Help me to restore

order if I do.

You are my house,

my only home.

I am the spirit

who haunts you;

a dove making

its nest in your steeple.

 

When we sleep

we linger at the door

daring to turn the knob

with our teeth,

breathing through

the keyhole,

ever curious toward

the other side.

 

If freed from you,

would there again be

the prospect of love,

of being courted,

of being saved

from ourselves

by ourselves

outside the room

of our selves?

 

Freed from the daily

adaptation to pain, 

we would again feel

capable of anything.

 

Here, where

our hands still work,

and our feet tread

without complaint,

with no need for glasses

to see what's true,

our teeth return

to their mouths;

a necklace of

salvaged pearls

from the depths

smiling their way through

memories that mean little

to anyone but us.

Yet we would not trade them

for fear the way back

lay by way of

a hole

in the ground.

 

Maybe

only on the other side

will we know what’s true

is all that’s real.

 

With no need

for clothes

we leave behind us

the tyranny

of to do lists,

clocks that held

our faces in place,

smells to remember

other lives by.

Now 

with no need for art,

  only the none-too distant 

prospect of waking

can we find our way.

 

At night in the house

of our bodies

we are errant children,

daring to be homeless

in hopes of regaining

a splendor

as bright as 

a single day.

11/3/23