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FOUR ALLUSIVE FIELDS
Who is Cy Twombly? What is it he does?
And what are we to call what he does? —Roland Barthes Cy listens absently to absent Homer & his refusal become a dead thing full of music Smash it on a cyclotron. Drag it across a dozen centuries Drips are old. Smudges are old. Talking a museum out of its eternal monologue, it’s not embarrassing to leak in waves & cones. Nudes fall from newspapers as you fell from an oily twilight, from a painting of the word twilight, arranged without letters, inkless like a fire that consumes all before it, or better, inkless as the phrase: “like a fire that consumes all before it” Who wouldn’t be mayor of a worked-over surface returning clutter for a broom, ever-after for Cliffs Notes Work smudging talk; talk smudging work Obedience is an awful word I think to get lost in * Cy listens absently to absent Homer explaining himself away. Boring as a canvas to a waterfall, as a splotch of red to equations lifting a helicopter, injured by a display of attentiveness can you believe this humming anonymous light The light is anonymity. Break it against an electron, smear it with a magpie’s greenish black tail feather, cast it on a sheet of orange vellum pasted inside a brown leather book A cricket’s ankle is not fragile to the cricket Dab it there. It has nothing to do with the sun The sun is a system free from authority & you sweet shy Achilles have already worn through your shoes & the pedestal beneath * Cy listens absently to absent Homer taking notes that amount to nothing, & nothing erases as well as a name. Can one draw a careless world out of its engorged abdomen? Ask that moth eating through a painted magpie what grinding against a shard of twilight gave it. Flowers chalked over aluminum & the elegance of taped-on wings. Ladders reaching the roof behind rain clouds brushed on to cover a mistake Who wouldn’t mistake the surface for vapid paint a cloud for a sarcophagus a bed for a life your white shirt for mine, blue for blue. Depending on the vantage point proves you hang from it in pieces, & though we hadn’t arrived on the same boat, we’re surely on the same boat now * Cy listens absently to absent Homer regards a useless allegory spreading its human shape across inaudible dirt. Sparse, porous, scattered any moment’s fringe epicenter is irredeemably stalling & you move away like a building or a horse The useless allegory adheres to logic, the first principle of representation: if you walk to the bridge & refuse the view clouds of blue steam still billow from a grate below a green dumpster. Ask grime on a limbless statue surrounded by tulips in May & hope for an end to winter who doesn’t age absently ignoring unhinged flesh Nakedness is a carriage & I’m in love with impossibility for its dynamic body. A shard of twilight smashed on the cyclotron. If you can see the fibers don’t say so |  |
