What's really strange about poetry
is that it's using the tools of conversation
for not conversation.
And you have to keep reminding people that.
And so up front, and these poems are concerned with visual art.
But even so, I had to say, I'm singing, and I'm lying,
and I'm going to have talking animals,
and so no, this isn't true.
And there's a reason it isn't true.
It's because there's the world, and there's the painting,
there's the light, and there's how the paint moves.
And so I decided I would say up front, first line, first pump,
you could be faithful to the world, or to the paint.
I'm being faithful to the paint.
You can put the book down now if you want, but I told you,
I told you what I'm doing.
"The way the light reflects."
The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects.
So what's there to be faithful to?
I am faithful to you, darling.
I say it to the paint.
The bird floats in the unfinished sky with nothing
to hold it.
The man stands.
The day shines.
His insides and his outsides kept apart
with an imaginary line.
Thick and rude and imaginary, because there is no separation.
Fallacy of the local body, paint on paint.
I have my body, and you have yours.
Believe it if you can.
Negative space is silly.
When you bang on the wall you have
to remember you're on both sides of it already.
But go ahead, yell at yourself.
Some people don't understand anything.
They see the man but not the light,
they see the field but not the varnish.
There is no light in the paint.
So how can you argue with them?
They are probably right anyway.
I paint in his face, and I paint it out again.
There's a question I am afraid to ask.
To supply the world with what?