This is Labor
Day and I work
to sustain my character
against the contradictions.
I observe Lincoln on his
throne
in a green haze.
An American flag
almost entirely
hides the Flatiron
building.
Red Pegasus
flies toward a catwalk.
Why on Labor Day
do I try to track
these impeccable sources?
The woman swims
toward Kafka’s grave
on dry land.
The most luminous
thing
in our mythology
is time enumerating
the hours
as we swing
from lighted match
to the woman
in her narrowing sea.
As I work, a veiling
covers the salt
my eyes
blear out from,
and I think I have
escaped.
When I kissed the woman,
a twist of the
elbow extinguished
her in such light
that the quivery orange
and black
swift of her hair
could not be
observed even
in close presence.
She played the
clackers and when
the combo beat
came around, her slender
body
seemed heavy-breasted
as it rose into the danger
of sex.
Subliminally,
the mood questions its mobility.
Psychology dotes
on little children,
shuffling toward sleep.
Poetry enters its
primal phase
as a labor
to be fringed like a Hebrew
prayer shawl
in the musty school.
What is to be
asked for
is an animal head
nailed to the wall.
Traces of a subject
remain even
in abstract
paintings
where the colors
are a dead giveaway. The goat
complains too loudly
about being stuffed to the
gills.
In the white
hallway, the muzzled elk
gazes into the mirror
as if it saw the ghost
of its ancestors.
It goes on
staring,
puzzled, as if it knew
this vision was
its last.
The hours pare away
what is left
of time. The woman
carries on, pretending
to be
alive,
although she is dead
to the world.
A stream bends
in the middle. I think
of her swimming
stiffly,
a mythical woman
made of mind-stuff,
inhabiting the hours of Labor Day
with me, as I
work, infusing her.
The margin is
scrupulous, holding in
what threatens
to go beyond,
and now
it is tomorrow.
I plan to sleep
into autumn and leave
the animals to
their playthings
and graces.
A distant friend
has shot himself,
perhaps for love.
September 11 comes on again,
which caused me a fall,
a contusion,
rather a lack
of good sight than the
towers’
crumbling engines.
The hours pare away time.
Solitude is good
for words’ arrival
and departure.
with a debt to Robert Rauschenberg
This way and that way,
a moment to reflect
on nature
as the funding of indigent
proprieties.
It is the normal things
that drive us crazy.
We can see
Carolee
Schneemann
in floral-patterned
frock, blue and
pink as if
she could be
anybody.
The nature she embodies,
while human,
is nonetheless
a subtraction from
windows we look through.
Soutine’s “Female Nude”
is a confession
in brushstrokes
of an intensity
more deliberate
than derivative,
notations that
quiz nudity
as a concept
more intimate than
pleasure.
To share a life
becomes a various
proposal linked
to a field trip
among the constellations.
Yes, we say,
a good man,
a good woman.
A registered nurse
who blushes
at the sight
of a young, naked
body.
Sex is a feminist
correction.
Soutine’s “Side of Beef”
is almost tropical
in the hard, European
winter,
designed as a red
instance preferred
to violence cut
in agonizing
strips.
The wound is left alone
to die in limbo.
Carolee
Schneeman has
lived with
The Dead Sea
Scroll inserted in her
vagina,
so when unrolled from there
as a performance,
the reading
of it,
accounts for
a moral decision,
an aggressive offering
to be deciphered
in feminist acoustics.
The word
weighs no more
than any law in crystal
packaging.
In the framework
of the French
Pyrenees, Soutine
celebrated
the Ceret
landscape
with giant, sometimes
fierce,
strokes.
Somewhere else a woman’s
teeth
are big in a
red firebox.
Other women appear later,
mad in rictus, around them
the Furies attack
from their caves
with political flames.
Soutine hides in his death,
suppressing the
holiday that powers
from meat to myth.
With her body
and thought,
Carolee Schneemann
has organized
the disrobing
of women as an
art
in a society
heavy with approximations.
Her “Meat Joy”
professes a delight in
naked
anatomy as a
way to materialize
godhead for the
good
of doubt’s debates.
To judge her
is a job Soutine
would have
left behind
like an old country.
He might have
used her
to model an expression
of art
as a conjunction of the
hand
and eye
to measure joy
in the yield
of provocation.
All art, he knew,
coincides with
intense
privacy and public
desolation,
where mind is
fervent in the raw,
primeval freeze
that howls through
Siberia.