Max pulls a poem
from his bag and offers
it to me: hand-written
on lined paper
only one coffee stain.

His sandy hair is a bird’s nest
his goatee white, his eyes quick
his smile easy—this boy
I didn’t remember, now middle-aged
and sitting across from me over quiche
and coffee at the Pie Company.

Max is my first Christmas present
the poem, my second.                     

“It was raining,” he said, “and the line of people waiting
to enter the Cluny Museum so long
I walked across the street
to the café.

I thought I might write a poem.”

Every year since 1981, Max has flown to Paris.
Each time, he goes to the Cluny Museum
to see The Lady and the Unicorn:
6 tapestries glowing in a red haze
each with a lady, a unicorn
and a lion.

He stands in the darkened room thinking of a thousand
things, including the small poem
he saw 45 years ago
in East Lansing.

The poem is lost.

He can’t remember the words
but it convinced him
to go to Paris.

I who wrote the poem cannot find it anywhere.

He followed a thread shining in the dark—
all the way to La Dame a la Licorne.

He has followed that thread
back to me, bringing a poem in which he “weaves
his way up the stairs, to the room where time
is frozen and the lady is waiting.”

Now, he places the thread in my hands.
You cannot see it but it holds us

together.

     after the painting by Stanley Spencer 
 

Even washing is a task, in war and daily
life. The warm and pour, the fresh linen,
the hourglass of soap in its melt telling
us how our tired flesh gleams to fiction
renewal. Time is at war. We are meant to lose
that we may grasp what we know: the waste
of passioned effort. The soldier nearest to us
dunks his face in the bowl, a murky foretaste
of baptismal death. This halo we discover
from which he’ll surely rise, suspender cords
rhyming the sink. Next to him another
wrings the towel and turns his head toward
Bellona. Not incongruous. The patroness,
too, of the trench of days and the hearth’s duress.

Someone arranged them in 1620.
Someone found the rare lemon and paid
a lot and neighbored it next 
to the plain pear, the plain
apple of the lost garden, the glass
of wine, set down mid-sip—
don’t drink it, someone said, it’s for
the painting.  And the rabbit skull—
whose idea was that?  There had been
a pistol but someone was told, no,
put that away, into the box with a key
though the key had been
misplaced now for a year.  The artist
wanted light too, for the shadows. 
So the table had to be moved. Somewhere
I dreamt the diary entry
on this, reading the impossible
Dutch quite well, thank you, and I can
translate it here, someone writing
it is spring, after all, and Herr Muller
wants a window of it in the painting, almost
a line of poetry, I thought even then,
in the dream, impressed 
with that "spring after all," that 
"window of it" especially, how sweet
and to the point it came over
into English with no effort at all
as I slept through the night. It was heavy,
that table. Two workers were called
from the east meadow to lift
and grunt and carry it
across the room, just those
few yards.  Of course one of them
exaggerated the pain in his shoulder. 
Not the older, the younger man. 
No good reason
to cry out like that.  But this
was art. And he did, something
sharp and in the air that 
one time. All of them turning then,
however slightly. And there he was, 
eyes closed, not much 
more than a boy, before 
the talk of beauty
started up again.

Upon first glance, it is difficult to decipher a figure, much less a facial expression. Upon first glance, it is difficult, the figure. Upon first glance, there is no face. Upon first, undecipherable, the glance. It is difficult. It depends on who is looking. We might say: Upon first glance, we are in a dark room. We are behind our eyelids in the room. We are looking, in the dark. The figure before us is also behind the eyelids, their eyelids. It is as if neither we nor they are present to the other, though we are, looking, together, in and from the dark. We look to work out the other’s intentions. We cannot. We look. We breathe together inside the room inside. The figure, having been exposed, overexposed, to light has become like a shadow or a barely lit shape on the midnight lake. For the sake of simplicity, we could call the figure a man, but I will not. We are in the room that precedes all that. The cleavage of this from that. It goes: first darkness, then form. Remember that. Try. If we look too long at the lake what surfaces is the old thought—when I was a child, when I was a child—we are thrown back to before, not shame, but shame of shame. We become furious and wild-limbed and kind. We pass the clause between us, a rope tethering, tethering, taut. A poem, we’ve been taught, though we can’t say where, should leave this part out. We should rush from room to bright room so that we can be surprised by what we find. But the figure is still in the dark. They require our stillness. Our black breath. I am afraid, I say to no one, to be like this image. Upon first glance, unreachable. Exposed. When I was a child, there was a figure in the dark. A man. Let’s call him that. A man. I was a question. I was a question he answered. I was a question he held and demanded my stillness. Part of me lives in that room, still, though I left it with a new, wretched name. But—and I can say this now—he saw me, the man in the dark, when no one else could see me. When I was, in manner of speaking, difficult to decipher. A darkness before form. He held me. Stilled me. He brought me into the frame. We were two black men there, in the black, the close black, the black from which life, relentlessly, comes. The breath between us was cruel. But I could see him. Him. I could see the sorrow, the rage, the calm water, the father raising his fist, the unnamable quiet of his face.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

            on Gustav Klimt’s painting, 1907-1908

Do you really think if you bend

me, I will love you? You

crack my chin up, your hands

brown pigeons scheming reunion

at my cheek and temple, your jaw

cragged at the end of your thick neck

of longing. I claw onto you

as the only tree here, your

swing. I’m mad for gravity though

I’m bound, diagonally, to

you. Let me. Push from your trunk towards

the edge and my freedom. Leave me

to wither while moss weeps

in the corners, our halo liquid

as yolk, waving from our bodies’ heat,

our divinity melting. My dress

blossoms loudly. You are still

wrestling me closer. If only I could

release to you my mouth just this

once and you would leave me,

but the shadows of your robe are

so haphazard. I know you will try

to smother me again. The poppies scratch. My feet

reach beyond spring.

^{—after David Hammons’s “Close Your Eyes and See Black”}

1. Smear your forearms with something like shea butter or sunscreen and lean over a bright piece of paperboard, facedown. Hover there, then print your body onto to the paper below. See how your forearms, printed there, make the top half of a diamond?

2. There is no clear narrative. What is clear, scanning the artwork from top to bottom, are details of a naked, muscular torso: two nipples, a hairy chest in the shape of a heart, the elastic band and wrinkled beginnings of a pair of trousers—and strikingly, within the torso, the portrait of a face—cupped by two hands.

3. Close your eyes and see black.

4. What is the texture and mood of your blackness? What seeking, sweetness, or sorrows does it hold?

5. Then the bottom edge of the frame.

6. In Close Your Eyes and See Black, the white space is not white. It is golden, a deep royal hue. Everywhere the body print isn’t is the color of a peeled Georgia peach.

7. Place your hands over your head and make the shape of a diamond.

8. Back to the portrait of a face. It appears like a ghost: centered in the torso, centered in the lower half of the frame. It appears beneath the nipples and above the elastic of wrinkled pants. It appears to be a photographic image of a Black man. It appears this man is closing his eyes, is seeing black.

9. What blacknesses do you see? What blacknesses have printed themselves onto you?

10. To make this body print, David Hammons coated his hair, skin, and clothes with grease and pressed his body onto the paperboard. Then the artist dusted a dark pigment on top, which adhered to the grease’s stickiness.

11. There is no face in the top half of the art work. Instead, a negative space, a rich, golden hue breathes into the space of the diamond.

12. The color of a lucky, double-yolk egg.

13. What must it feel like to shine in shadow; to glow darkly in the sun?

^{—after still life paintings by Rachel Ruysch at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam}

All winter the grass has held fast  
to green so lush it is easy to forget  
how hard the ground can be  
without an expanse of blades 
to cushion an unexpected fall. It is  
warm here and at first a relief to shrug off  

the wool coat, untie the want  
for sunlight, move in a cotton dress  
cut from ocean blue cloth, water  
the birds of paradise, beaks parted  
in your mangrove of yard, flock that thrives  
in soil that could never sustain the flowers  

you can’t help but miss, blooms nursed  
for months beneath the snow, daffodils  
and paper whites, bulbs bred to endure  
the burrow, roots shortened by season, buds  
clenched in fists of unfurled petals, the strength  
they require to break through the ground. 

                        After Andrew Wyeth’s “Groundhog Day”

The painter who wanders your house night and day,
sketches his way in and out your back door,
kitchen, barn, and milking room, he’s erased all trace
of you. Look, your favorite tea cup, the one
that’s snug to the curl of your forefinger, even that’s gone
bleached white as moths, something a dream tossed back.
The print has disappeared from the china rim—no more
apple bloom or trumpet vine vining a smooth weave.
No gray green, salt blue, faint as any wave
glimpsed from distance. Day after day
he paints you and the dog sleeping—shut eye, wolfish
set to his jaw—then the bunchbacked skittery quick.
But in the end, the dog disappears as you do.
Cup, knife, plate. His fangs menace from the rough-cut
log beyond the open window. And you? Are you the strip
of light glancing the wall, obstinate refusal to quit
or give in? It was your hands set the table, raked the grate,
chopped firewood far side of the pines. Is it your quiet
the painter caught? The long slow place before the scrape
of a gate lifts from its hinges and your husband strides in
fresh from New Holland, rushed talk of horses, calves, and tractor
gusts the room like an unseen wind, settles to the porcelain
chink and domestic sing of knife on a dinner plate.

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, 
  Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;  
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; 
  Its horror and its beauty are divine. 
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie 
  Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,  
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,  
The agonies of anguish and of death. 
 
Yet it is less the horror than the grace  
  Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone;
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face  
  Are graven, till the characters be grown  
Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 
  'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown  
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain. 
 
And from its head as from one body grow, 
  As [   ] grass out of a watery rock, 
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow  
  And their long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions shew  
  Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock  
The torture and the death within, and saw  
The solid air with many a ragged jaw. 
 
And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
  Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes; 
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft  
  Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise  
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, 
  And he comes hastening like a moth that hies
After a taper; and the midnight sky  
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. 
 
'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;  
  For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare  
Kindled by that inextricable error,
  Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air  
Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror  
  Of all the beauty and the terror there— 
A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, 
Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.