Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything

Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject

A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye

Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops,

A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion

Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins

Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests,

When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed

It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell,

Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model

Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them

As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself

In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell

Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.

You must look without looking to make the perfect circle.

The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid

Until the drawing is complete.

*

ARS POETICA FOR THE ONES LIKE US

after Mark Rothko & Leonard Cohen

I like the story about the man who talks

God into letting him live until he is done

With his masterwork. In some versions

He is a painter, but in this one he is a singer

Who then sings every sentence, whose song

Becomes a poem that does not end

Because it is eternally revised. Who can say

Whether Orpheus, when he found honey

In other hives, did not sing to let the devil know

His body was alive? He was the first to grieve,

Years in advance, the news of his death.

At the wake I explained that the poem could be

Thought of as a house: a bedroom where a boy

Undresses before a slightly older girl and vanishes

In her shade; a basement where the furnace

And subliminal pipes are kept; an attic

Where aesthetic and spiritual innuendos drift.

If I could have stepped out of the poem,

My feet would have remained four or five inches

Above ground because the ground was covered

In four or five inches of snow. It is breath

That makes the tragic endurable. It is earth

That provides our basis for being rooted

To ourselves. It is evening that lets us,

For an instant, be possessed by someone else.

I believed, for example, that I was in control.

The girl, I have almost forgotten her name,

Told me the poem would want the windows

Closed. I tried drawing her face to my face

So that her face could be exposed.

From inside the poem I was asked to map

The world outside and the adventure to unfold.

I looked at the window, but I could not see

Through the window because it resembled

A painting of light coloring a veil

Shaped like a window. Some things in this world