A Remembrance of Aerial Forms
MISE-EN-SCÈNE
As Ashbery did it, he pledged his anger to build a bridge
Like that of Avignon—not the idyll of the nursery rhyme,
But the incomplete one falling for centuries—on which
People may dance for the feeling of dancing on a bridge.
Least said, soonest mended at last—his complete face
Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor.
Each day I cross the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge holding
My breath, twice, trying not to stop at the flag midway
And take a turn to leap headlong into the Hudson—
An OUT OF ORDER sticker on the hotline, and twice each
Day I ask why, if “Life is Worth Living,” the sign doesn’t
Capitalize the copula? The bridge silently performs
Empire’s specious obsession with monumental fantasy—
You send the fireworks scene from Les Amants du Pont-Neuf.
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1960. Graphite on paper. Art Basel.
A HIRED HAND FOR THE BARE MINIMUM
The thing to do was chase a chicken down
With a broom as she ran her blood out—
I was a child, and my godfather smacked
Me on the back of my head for laughing.
What makes you think you have what it takes
To give us something for nothing forever?
Friends of friends lost friends to the storm,
Slurped into the sky easy as a root-beer
Float—easy because it’s difficult but worth
The effort. The last straw sticks to the rim
Of a dirty glass. The petrichor dares you,
A corpse in training, to surrender your seat.
Me, rising from bed with a perfect illness—
This is far from over reads this far from forever.
MYRIOPTICON
Once again, I wake (in a pool of my own blood)
To the sound of other men like me in the loud
Forms of cicadas, katydids, and crickets who
Have a lot of information to share about food
Or the presence of danger conspiring to come
Closer or spread out across the neighborhood.
My twitching, stinging eye sees the moon
Presiding over this widening pool of blood,
And it no longer holds a sense of possession—
Innocent of any skill to keep the ripples still.
I once stood with a common rose at noon—
Watched as it advanced from branch to leaf
Then leaf to blossom and fruit with ease.
Our possession craves the fall inside the fall.
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961. Welded steel, canvas, fabric, rawhide, copper wire, and soot. MoMA.
VERTIGO
Dawn on the thruway
Through the treed
Manchester corridor
Near the Finger Lakes,
One Hells Angel,
A nomad far from
Bohemia, thunders
By into the empty
Distance ahead,
And in the empty
Distance behind,
A deer walks slowly
Across the pavement
From wood to wood.
TEST PRESSING
It was all a bullfight in the end—
The smell of death contends
With rain, and more blood than
We can measure or imagine is
Surrounded by spinning black
Umbrellas—I know the people
Under them by name but not
The one among them who can
Keep memory to signals calling
On us to crave possession, hum
And nod as another universe
Apes its vivid curse alone—
A voice in distant noise rises
To return in the space between.
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961. Graphite on paper. Tate.
WANDERING HALF-ROTTED IN PARADISE
Flies swarm on the weary body streaming blood—
It can go no further despite its drive to go on.
Night rises on the road behind, ahead all uphill.
The heart is a white flag run high in the wind—
Threads, teeming out the hand trying to keep
Them in, are a kind of mother. Disclosed—
Left in the most private fear and slow to die.
Who will know how to say what the inch
Of grass now growing where his heart used
To be meant? Is it enough to know there
Was enough sun and rain all spring long?
The wind erases over ignorant of design
Parching sound, chilling the mere talk out—
For a while the dust weighed on my mind.
THE PASSENGER
Am I obligated to suffer like the rest of you?
Because I do, more or less, suffer like you.
Rather than negotiating with what is the case,
Suffering is the desire for what’s present to be
Other than what it is, the violent quintessence
Of the romantic impulse toward metaphor,
The supplanting of one thing for another.
I like dragging things out of the trash to sell
Back to you for more than they were new.
The way you walk into the room tells me
Some of who you are, but there is nothing
Like hearing a person sing, which is like
Listening in on a private phone conversation
Between middle management and home.
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1980-98. Welded steel, porcelain, wire mesh, canvas, grommets, and wire. MoMA.
AFTER WEI T’AI
Words convey feeling if they are precise
About their subject and not the feeling,
Because the mind relates with words
And the feeling is revealed in them—
That is how the poem gains entry in us.
If I directly say what overwhelms me,
Nothing withheld to linger in mystery,
Words will never go beyond the surface.
That will not make it impossible for you
To suppress the impulse to tap and wave
Your body in time to the pulse of words,
Let alone strengthen your character
And refine the culture, or set heaven
On earth to dance and call up our dead.
AT CAPACITY
My reflection moves, and I am moved—
Transfixed in a hog bending moment
On one side, and a sag on the other—
Time is a parabolic reflection of itself!
No. Lifting a glass of water to my lips,
I still never know what we’ve said
And done or the consequent opposite.
I do not know enough to know better,
A telephone ringing in a storm sewer.
How will you hear from me again?
Purpose is prologue fading with age,
A slaughterhouse filled with intention—
We know there is very little left to say.
I have put something down to let it go.
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1962. Pencil on paper. MoMA.
