Four Allusive Fields
Who is Cy Twombly? What is it he does?
And what are we to call what he does?
—Roland Barthes
Cy listens absently to absent Homer
& his refusal become a dead thing full of music
Smash it on a cyclotron. Drag it across a dozen centuries
Drips are old. Smudges are old. Talking a museum
out of its eternal monologue, it’s not embarrassing
to leak in waves & cones. Nudes fall from newspapers
as you fell from an oily twilight, from a painting
of the word twilight, arranged without letters, inkless
like a fire that consumes all before it, or better, inkless
as the phrase: “like a fire that consumes all before it”
Who wouldn’t be mayor of a worked-over surface
returning clutter for a broom, ever-after for Cliffs Notes
Work smudging talk; talk smudging work
Obedience is an awful word I think to get lost in
*
Cy listens absently to absent Homer
explaining himself away. Boring as a canvas
to a waterfall, as a splotch of red to equations
lifting a helicopter, injured by a display of attentiveness
can you believe this humming anonymous light
The light is anonymity. Break it against
an electron, smear it with a magpie’s
greenish black tail feather, cast it on a sheet
of orange vellum pasted inside a brown leather book
A cricket’s ankle is not fragile to the cricket
Dab it there. It has nothing to do with the sun
The sun is a system free from authority
& you sweet shy Achilles have already worn
through your shoes & the pedestal beneath
*
Cy listens absently to absent Homer
taking notes that amount to nothing, & nothing
erases as well as a name. Can one draw a careless world
out of its engorged abdomen? Ask that moth
eating through a painted magpie what grinding
against a shard of twilight gave it. Flowers
chalked over aluminum & the elegance
of taped-on wings. Ladders reaching the roof
behind rain clouds brushed on to cover a mistake
Who wouldn’t mistake the surface for vapid paint
a cloud for a sarcophagus a bed for a life your white shirt
for mine, blue for blue. Depending on the vantage point
proves you hang from it in pieces, & though we hadn’t
arrived on the same boat, we’re surely on the same boat now
*
Cy listens absently to absent Homer
regards a useless allegory spreading its human shape
across inaudible dirt. Sparse, porous, scattered
any moment’s fringe epicenter is irredeemably stalling
& you move away like a building or a horse
The useless allegory adheres to logic, the first principle
of representation: if you walk to the bridge & refuse the view
clouds of blue steam still billow from a grate
below a green dumpster. Ask grime on a limbless statue
surrounded by tulips in May & hope for an end to winter
who doesn’t age absently ignoring unhinged flesh
Nakedness is a carriage & I’m in love with impossibility
for its dynamic body. A shard of twilight smashed
on the cyclotron. If you can see the fibers don’t say so
