We poems make words. Words make we.
It's why poems work.
Take shape, grow wings.

We rely on sound: your brain forming mouth,
forming mind. We become; your hands
wring out the hours:
drip-

drop.

What makes us soak in an empty mixture,
experience you've
mastered; you make us from the sap
off your new
planted tree—planted
a thousand times.

Like trees, soft saplings or knobbed ancients
—we remain stilted. Ringed with
antonym. We are blown by the same air.

We make other things, too. We poems,
we trees. We make a boat
to carry, a thing to climb into,
neither of us knowing what it means—
survival. We are all dumb.

Some people find poems about death depressing.
Like death could ever be wholly beautiful without us,

without poems to sound your whirling from this world to another,
prying into what's passed, what's gone and what will be gone.

Tonight dreams of poems carve whale ships—imagination.
Memory by memory, your mind.

I'll say this about my painting: I don't understand it.
The man could be a painter standing
at his easel. His shirt and pants are gray, and
a bit too elegant-looking.
Red slices of cadmium flit about him, to make you notice.

He is surrounded by a landscape of his own
making. Standing on the turquoise Surrealist border
of the eastern section, he faces the blood brown red bloom
of the Orient. Encased in his work, he appears worried.

To ignore the yellow circle behind his head
would deny the next tick of the story.

He has just looked down, seen the head of a drowning man.
He must know he cannot save him.
Is the man in my painting fortunate

to be held in that moment before decision,
woven and thick with the consequences of knowing
the world is hungry for heroes?

There are rooms of Rubens, galleries
Of tapestries, halls of artillery and armor.
There are scraps of hieroglyphs,
Shards of pottery, shreds of costumes,
Displays of furniture, cameos, amulets,
Talismans, totems, sarcophagi, scrimshaw,
Illuminated manuscripts and silver
Inkwells, stained glass, blown glass,
Ceramic urns, basalt lions, ossuaries,
Odalisques and obelisks, cubists, fauvists,
Abstract expressionists, landscapes, still lifes,
Portraits, photographs, monoprints, etchings,
Lithographs, and woodblocks.
From the Cycladics to Haring,
We've not been content unless
We could clutter another wing
Of another museum with our relics.
Even now,
A high school sketch class sprawls
On the marble floor, copying details
Of folds of Pallas Athena's drapery.
I want to say STOP to them,
I want to say LOOK AROUND, kids,
Calculate the true odds, please.
Whatever you think you will do,
It's been done.
Done better and done often.
Why bother? Why waste the time?

Then one student, a small Asian girl,
Gets the shading right for the very first time
And beams like she'll glow all night.

            The world probably has enough poems, too.

            On the second floor
                                                Bed
        hangs in a rear gallery
                                                deteriorating.

  Sheets sag down the wall.
                                                Color slobbered,
        linseed double suicide.
                                                Better
        than painting the night.

                                                It will not keep,
                                the fabric
                                                is breaking apart.
            Bed became artifact,
                                                yellow
                        with familiarity.

                                                Pigment
                              is fugitive,
                                                Bed
                                    drains

10:30 at night (dishes washed, pot roast in the amber refrigerator dish) you got your second wind, went back into the studio, sat in your chair (white chair, smudges retouched with titanium white) and opened the clamshell trays of pigment (the trays from a salad bar as the career girls pushed, the pigments your pyramids). Flicked on the special lamp of true daylight, cast your eyes on last night's work (too heavy, that line of gray). Picked up the flat size 6, swabbed its broad tip through oily cobalt. Walked a line of that blue next to that field of dark green. Delicious, wasn't it, the sound of paint rolling its edge across the canvas, bristles whispering into cotton. Outside in the street's brash lights, people rushed home after dinners out, cabs barked and lunged for fares. A half hour, an hour you doted on your rectangles, golden sections of 8, 5, 3, the stalwart assembly of related but not similar colors (as you always pointed out): cobalt, flake gray, cerulean, prussian, ultramarine. You felt a twinge paring down that block of dark green, that dwindling tint that never mixed the same. By its formula in your pigment book you'd written not quite. The midnight streets turned leather in the drizzle, traffic thinned out. In your studio the canvas leaned back against the easel for a long conversation. Your husband called good night, got in bed for an old movie, soon the hap-happy of a dance number tapped on the walls. The lamp of true daylight buzzed loyally behind you. Crowded now, that green was causing trouble, a murky hole in the field. You only live once, you thought, and took up a dab of winsor blue, painted over the green, restored order to the world.

We are climbing
hotdog chomping
don't look around too soon
I could still be Queen today
I enter
Alone, I start shrinking
just like Alice
hotdog chomping
"isn't it amazing"
This is a museum
tour guide or real estate agent
politely they nod
"Up those stairs are the nineteenth century paintings"
amuse her
no noise no noise
"I swore they were here"
exotic prints smells language
sneak into my eye
Twist twist my dirty blond hair
Weighing myself carelessly
not very kindly
staring rudely at people in the elevator
speaking French
I am sixteen and I smoke
STOP
and soar through ivory beasts
eat the paint and dive into the pond
passionately ferociously imagine
jungles grow inside me
simple manipulations become pious
"He was this close"
"Please ma'am, not that close"
washed with knowledge
hands made this I have hands
"It gives me chills"
no, really, I really do"
what Suck what
I am fourteen and my mother won't buy me Levi's
I can fly though
and drink wine
"I've seen what I came here to see"
"Let's go get a pretzel"
with cheese.

She dressed properly,
She spoke quietly,
She loved modestly,
She died peacefully.

Harmless, humble,
God's lamb...

Damn!

1.
You paint like you make love:
with one soft motion you start the scene.
Your hand moves gently,
correcting color and creating form.
You prime your subject
and arrange your breath around her.
You delight in the nude lines
and tell her to hold still.

2.
It is half past four
and you are still dressed.
You rebraid your hair on olive arms
and bring out more wine.
You show me old lithographs,
chatting about galleries.
Your canvas has been blue for a month
because, you say,
purple is too passionate.

3.
You have finally gone back to painting.
Your hand moves quickly
in breathless bold lines,
unusual angles.
It knows what it wants
though you keep your mind doubting.

I am the model
so I try to hold still.
Yes, you paint as you love:
at times your hand wavers.
The brush fails
and you call it a night.

I read an article;
it was on potato art.
For Materials and Methods,
I cut a profile of my mother,
added yellows, reds and blacks,
and pressed the shape to paper.
Six faces among white spaces:
it was beautiful.
So impressed, for a contest
I decided on Mary and Joseph
and, in pastels and chalks, a horse,
God's hand and sky;
I didn't win but
the professor asked to keep it.
The trick is simple:
design your vision,
take a knife and cut away at it.
Finally, stamp your work for show.

her hair a
brindling of
autumn over
his

face, as
freckled hands
lend amplitude
to land-

scape; his
canvas pants
& shoes excuse
them-

selves; the
nipples dip &
redly barn his
brush

jake pollock? i posed for him in the late 1940s. you didn't know he worked with models even during his abstract expressionist years? jake always wore his collar up around his face like he was hiding something. he was embarrassed by his childhood in wyoming. he used to brand his sister and then cut himself with a bowie knife. he always was sweet to me and when we made love it was like he was peeling back my skin and entering a part of me where no one had ever been before. we'd clink glasses and he'd fuck me and then i'd lie there naked and he'd get inspired and start dripping paint. creating canvasses full of human skulls and explosions of black and red and green. i guess he never would have been the painter he was if i hadn't stirred up his wildness. i guess i was kind of responsible for him doing what he did. his wife lee knew it was me who stirred him up. we once had a fight at the cedar tavern in front of kline and de kooning. slamming away at each other till jake butted in and stopped it. jake was coming to see me the night he drove off the highway. i was posing for picasso. we were sleeping together and he wouldn't let me out of his sight. so i called jake and told him i couldn't be with him anymore. anyway i was with pablo that night jake went off the road. and sometimes i remember when jake and i'd sit at a booth at the cedar tavern and he'd stick his tongue in my mouth darting it around and he'd get excited like when he was spilling cans of color across the surface of his pictures creating surprises that jumped out of his subconscious like snakes or goblins or owls. yeah i love his paintings. they're messy but transcendent. they leap and spit and sizzle.