The Art of Navigation
He set black and white on fire.
|| Harry1 Gaugh on Franz Kline
The rugged2 brushstroke of the dying oak
is left standing3 for a week, limbless
as the marriage we find ourselves
dismantling. Without leaves
or branches to create perspective,
trunk and sky, shape and space, equilibrate（平衡，相称）
in the same plane, a balance of black
on white, white on black,
like the sketch4 Franz Kline enlarged,
in 1949, on a Bell|Optican projector,
crosscut of a junk|shop wooden rocker
he loved to paint as much as he loved
and painted his wife Elizabeth, Elizabeth
already lost then in her dark refrain.
When he saw himself in a book
she gave him || Nijinsky as Petrouchka ||
Franz painted that face to its grave. Over
and again he laid the dancer down, poor
swallowed soul, cheeks pinched（压紧的，痛苦的） hollow,
bent head pinioned5 by harlequined
hatband, lidless eyes eyeing nothing
but his own foreshortened depths.
Years of tracing, retracing6 steps
until the facts of the matter distilled
to stark7 architecture, passionately
unconcerned with finish ||
Elizabeth, Elizabeth ||
the same dark refrain（叠句，副歌） ||
But today the tree crew returns
to finish the job. One shimmies
up rope to test what's solid or void, and log
the byproduct for winter. Now he shouts
he's found monarchs8, just a small clump
high on the bare trunk, resting up,
absorbing the sun's heat: this time of year
they route their way by warmth ||
Some paths depend on abstraction
.
who knows how invisible lines
line the visible better than an old
sight|gagged clown? So teach, you paint|
and|pain|masked mime11. I can't find my way
any other way. Teach me to read maps
in the cadmium and singe|veined flakes
of monarchs brush|fired and dispersed
on a breeze, in the tree that
with the lightest of gestures,
like a finger touched against flesh,
the chainsaw opens, ring after ring.
|| in memory of Larry Levis
