9
9 Triptych
For Bruce Gardiner
Did Picasso do Stein or did Stein do Picasso.
Would this be the definitive public image, or would that
be too wooden, her face rendered as if detached and stuck
through a hole in a circus board. Would her word be ruse
or rose. I do and I dote as echo chamber, yet still
poem and painting converse. Just how that came about is a little
vague in everybody’s mind. Like a brushstroke the truth broke
and posed to me ninety times for this portrait. Would that be
to divide, to outstroke or outbrush one another. To what end this
is becoming yourself. As winter went on pulling down curtains
slow as a Swiss glacier. During these long walks and poses
I mediated, made sentences like a seesaw. Painting and poem
converge despite everyone’s interference. I, too, dislike it – my face –
but somehow it adheres, indifferent as an echo. I can’t see you
any longer when I look. All the same it is all there.
Not all there. Lights out. I’m taking a bath, listening
to the sonar pealings of a bat, which is arcing above
the trainline looking for things to chop up and chomp
down on. The bath water’s an Architect’s Table,
a phantasmal, shallow space churning with glacial,
three-dimensional colours, impossible to know
in the dark. I project its textures beneath my fingers
of hammered metal, chiselled stone, tiled brick,
stucco, cut paper and glass, while the noise of two
trains, my legs, ploughs through the water. All these
phenomena leap out at me. Other parallels look in.
But how to round them up or down. A little whorl
descends beneath the surface of the water while the
bat’s shadow ascends a wall, through two-dimensional
tree shadows, into the stuck night sky. My mind’s a flat
circle from certain angles, dropping traces of its leaving
into the choppy waters of MA JOLIE – my oval face reflecting
and projecting its appeal – as its desire branches out, as if
to sweep the sky, perceiving. And wouldn’t that mean,
or wouldn’t that be, to make of poiesis a batsign.
Is water ludic. Would it make me a luddite to think that. There is light
inside it. And utter it in liquid time. Really. What a to-do in the gutter.
Meanwhile, a reel of toads, or frogs, teems unruly in my garden.
Re gardening, I would like to speak magnolias to my beloved rogue
planet, the plural of France, but … (I’m getting the films mixed up) she’s
a Celtic melon from first to last (reel), raining birds.
Should this be mean, or not mean, be. Does being mean to speak
more freely when sampled and meanly sober, or does being merely libre
in reverse misread, for example, a glass of red mist as the exemplary
train of thought pouring through it, shattering Earth into a billion shards.
Do jests test the limits of admissible, the. In this are we just being
miserable, or does melancholia miss us, being the finest jest of all, as in
becoming who we may as well remain for the rest of our lives. And
wouldn’t that leave me abject, and our curls feeling sick (without a
beloved lemon).
So much for self-banalysis. For words such as (these) delphiniums (I
hand you) detonate into larkspur! With luck, doing both (with lemon)
will unstick us from this broth, so that understanding may begin, and in
doing so be undone.
Back in my bath, a vast broth of chaotic echoes, you and my text
reassemble beneath our touch, suggesting a pattern of diamonds or
lozenges, according to the trains. Or chess from a bat’s-eye point of
view. Or prison if we’re in a bad mood. Or at last a lucid cave to see us
through to the end of time in, budding with new chiasmata as if to
(dis)integrate glass in its prism.
Through that would light not scintillate.
Note: In Bruce Gardiner’s lecture on Gertrude Stein’s two poems “Picasso” and “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, Gardiner arrives at the notion that the latter of the two poems in particular “reconceives the nature and function of poetry, savouring three possibilities in turn. First, is poetry representational, as Plato thinks, concerned with exact resemblance? Second, is it symbolic, as Freud thinks, concerned with signs and their significance? And third, is it ludic, as Ludwig Wittgenstein thinks, concerned with rule-bound social and intellectual play? Stein is certainly anti-Platonic and anti-Freudian.” My “Triptych” plays on these three questions regarding the nature and function of poetry, while shards of Gardiner’s lecture, Stein’s poems, Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry”, John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poiesis Is Her Name” and Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas are refracted throughout.