I. Bearing the Beautiful Collision in Rothko
Long-held outmoded assumptions
that stocks of materials available
on this blue planet could never be
exhausted, or succeed in swamping
the populations with floods, are still
tender from eggshell digs in the greater
undone, while anthropological cracks
in the continuum warp photographic
eyes over the centuries. The outskirts
have been paved over using contraries
with old-world animals, glistening, rare,
on the screen. And so heaviness has more
than started to frame the freezing hot
whole range of slightest shifts in Celsius
leaching into electric longing and jackboot
fears, redesigning solidity while it falls
out of sync with quick-melting elevations.
At the table, unknowing may request more
servings, drifting over ground-hived bees
at the edges of shape where beings are,
who grew up with belief in the morning
and then evening. For the body seems to
have formed as a consequence of the roar
of vacuum-shattering outer space inflating
after the mysterious split-second ignition
that peaks now in the inherited tongue,
the ancestral jaw, familiar bones in chests,
as we try to grasp the fast-swelling oceans
of archaic languages with in-between colors
generated out of coevolving spiraled codes.
II. In the Room with Paul Klee
Sun as it blazes over the horizon
makes dawn in the primal brain
at one with the emergence of self.
It’s the nuclear fusion generator
you could feel at the root of being.
With cosmic rays showering stone
there’s quickening within matter,
the mother-seed of consciousness.
No person remains sculpted clay.
No clay’s playing the baritone sax.
Dark columns of smoke say wildfire
rides in on electromagnetic pulse
from a future already come to pass.
No person you’ve noticed in the day
was able to avoid some kind of birth.
The dawn sun in nuclear blazes
appears on the eastern horizon
in every cell which comes to life,
in every form of being created
by living collaborations of cells.
III. Pollock Painting Organic Expression
Given the huge number of other species alive in the human body
where they co-evolved with the organized systems of cells
and contribute now to inner workings we only know expressed,
it’s fair to say we haven’t exactly been alone and aren’t only ourselves.
It happens we aren’t exactly separate from all this circulating breath
that surrounds us, and we aren’t different from what becomes us,
what becomes of us in leaves and vines, in living alongside 230,000
newborns every day around the world or cradled here in our arms.
For the rain that falls to ground also reaches the blood, with 81,000
unnatural chemicals in air and water also chemicals in the cells,
where anyone’s material poverty is also poverty in us, with the living
climate the shell protecting the nut like the skull around a brain,
pollination guarded by husks of grain, bees that are breathing cells,
where we’re flying birds in the computer eye, wired with wild reactions,
the work wail populated with herds grazing over soft calls for extraction
to rev up the nectars of summer, that resist completion for the rest
of chaos, with aerodynamic blades generating the new energy still
spinning behind drips and splashes when Pollock moves at work
in old shoes all paint-slopped where the truth’s been aimed at gravity
making weight where thinking acts as if we’ve been here all along,
muscle memory lit from the tiger bones out to the clothes with truth
hungry enough to be both mother and father of the visible music
in indivisible slumps and peaks of philosophic matter off the brush
fallen heavier than trailer trucks of machine-tilled slipstreams turning
over the felt underground with ongoing circulation where we’ve been
or might have gone with dark and light streaming down fast into arcs
of concatenated sky out in the rain in falling rain that enters the blood
with its pulse of wind in between the poles, with tiger-toothed jewelry
of remote clusters of star birth leaning down into paint off the lip
of a can, while the can floats on the ocean of space separating worlds
in which archaic despair and rhythmic pulse have been splattered over
with onyx blood of the auroch, where the day’s been unable to stop
breaking out of primordial space to print the papers of night on canvas
that was resounding under inseparable Pollock from the downpour
in a solid drop of black that condenses destiny or spills growing
synaptic vines that fire en mass in conditions that gave rise to us.
IV. The Light in Paintings of Morris Graves
The long-practiced ancillary past
lifts and falls with overhanging
sprays, cypress and mangrove,
as easily as the strings of spiders
vibrate out of blameless presence
unfastening plumb. So the fingers
of the transcriptionist can move
with mineral precision that leans in
out of Chopin. But we can’t know
many footprints the coastal winds
long ago scrubbed. So possibilities
exist, some that are able to dwarf
the natural and human spheres
we know. The ancestors, of course,
couldn’t see how small the planet is
as the cosmos expands. The Hubble
telescope happened to photograph
aboriginal light that was impossibly
old in the present. Our ancestors
couldn’t see dreaming as the brain
in communication with the mind.
There aren’t many ways to locate
archaic existence that eventually
led to our lives. We couldn’t have
found half the vandalism left here
by gods. So Morris Graves painted
psychic regions of brilliant bright
yellows teleporting through history.