The Art of Navigation
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The Art of Navigation He set black and white on fire. -- Harry Gaugh on Franz Kline The rugged brushstroke of the dying oak is left standing 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 sketch 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 pinioned by harlequined hatband, lidless eyes eyeing nothing but his own foreshortened depths. Years of tracing, retracing steps until the facts of the matter distilled to stark 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 monarchs, 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 (the blind foraging of sleeping backs until the spines meet, hinge into wings). who knows how invisible lines line the visible better than an old sight-gagged clown? So teach, you paint- and-pain-masked mime. 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 |
