Abstract with Red Square
after Etel Adnan
And there,
between clean walls
you assume
the position,
angled toward
the red squares
roiling
on her canvases.
Into the oils
of a new tense
she herself
days before
had dissolved.
There, impasto:
her mountain.
Trimmed down
to the first
seeing.
Tamalpais
at every pitch,
pistachio
patches scraping
against cobalt.
Edges opaque
until they refused.
Mountainous,
she, too—
which is to say
surfacing,
color latching
to the seasons
where meaning
rushes.
Of this transition
the living are given
no access.
You, turning
away from
the dry wall,
where nothing
tears through.
A red square
appears in your days
yet you know
not yet where.
Copyright © 2022 by Jenny Xie. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 23, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The Lebanese American artist, writer, and activist Etel Adnan died in November of 2021. When I visited her exhibition at the Guggenheim, it had become a retrospective. Around the same time, I learned I was carrying a child—a realization that translated my mortality back to me in vivid, new language. ‘When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,’ Adnan once wrote. I think of her making the radical passage we’ll all one day make, hurtling onward into new forms.”
—Jenny Xie