A Job for Captain Entropy
1
Though clocks continue – even the plastic
digital watch I bought, deciding
cheap and replaceable is best –
time seems broken.
Not as a whole, only for me,
though local fractures may eventually
loosen larger gears and springs.
I’ve often said I value things
only as notes for what I’ll have
on the other side;
yet the disordered signifiers
stain the white radiance of the Signified.
So alluring, this wreckage –
remembered music long unheard,
paintings loved in reproduction;
and the girl, short and dark, probably Mother,
I saw only fragments of
behind pillars, across food courts,
throughout adolescence …
It seems absurd I won’t see her again.
Though actually the whole affair was absurd.
2
I’m unloading prints.
They won’t get much.
Things never unrolled,
let alone framed. It took the dealer
weeks to flatten them.
He’s pleasant to work with:
very old, and in his mild,
watery way, pleased.
Says art-world names I haven’t heard
since Father died.
He might like a poem
about a subject as arcane
as selling prints.
Turned down the Depression stuff –
tight-jawed farmers, packed tenements,
rags on rural nails; he loves them,
he assured me, but there’s no market,
despite recurrence.
But that woman from the Forties,
early Fifties – friend of both
my parents – might sell.
Amoeboid and insectile forms
against a diamond grid, or emerging
on the thin paper
from a dotted swarm, a stellar cluster.
Sometimes the suggestion
of a goddess or electron sphere
within the grid.
What do these objects say
about the culture that made them and
its phenotype?
*We have faced down the might
of Germany and Imperial Japan.
I have faced down the terrors
of divorce, of being a single
woman and artist.
Now I, singlehanded, will conquer
the transcendent realm, the archetype.*
3
He wears a funny yellow cloak,
insignia a graph or slope
smoothly descending.
His outfit is too tight; around
the midriff, embarrassing.
The features are bulbous, ignoble;
the intelligence flickering
in the piggy eyes has nothing to do
with what he does.
Hard to say what he does.
Faced with tears, recriminations,
screams, he clasps hands as if praying,
eyes moistening till
you feel sorry, even guilty
for troubling him; and if that doesn’t work,
he runs. He leans on your neck
with an explanation;
you choke before you’re sure
what it is, but are sure
it’s good. Over a foul field,
fragments of people
wander, then of fraying matter,
then of confused
pure thought, and encounter
only a giggle: *My work here is done*.
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