The Missing Portrait (1)
It does not do you like it
Imperfect copy’s forgery
Posts its vermillion decree
These anointed mistakes
Neither robust nor enticing
These dark orthogonals and parallel curves
This swift recession to the single
Disgusted, the poem closes its mouth
Full of revulsion, the poem proceeds to close its eyes and ears
Once it recognizes, it realizes
Escape is impossible
Snow continues falling inside the glass egg
The villagers are singing, but the children looking in cannot hear them
Someone calls this poetry
Someone said, you shall observe words
Stealing parts of language that remain missing
Why speak about the unspeakable and the silence surrounding it
The unspeakable is a planet, our destination,
And silence is its atmosphere
The poem’s mouth remains closed
There is no map that the poem can follow
The poem is a dog that doesn’t sniff the traces of fear clinging to us
A man decides to paint a tree while the radio announces the progress of a war
A critic writes you do not make progress painting a tree
A new machine is progress, a machine of words
Each more perfectly realized than the last, is progress
Another example might begin with
I returned the tree to the hill from which it was stolen
Stay, coward blood, and do not yield to beauty’s burning field
(I did not write this and neither did you)
And this latest example to arrive
The end is never near because it has always
Now the sky drifts out of the picture
Now the poem mangles its imperfect copy
#AmericanWriters Brooklyn Rail, Rutgers University at teaches
