Poem for Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977

to leave the human body

to the light of nature

to plunge it alive into the gleam of nature

where the sun will wed it at last

—Antonin Artaud, “Seven Poems”

The river remains, the few blades

of sawgrass plug its starched banks.

The river claims the tattered curl

of the cut canvas behind the frame.

Beneath the painting of the river

there is a photograph

& beneath the photograph

there is an image stained in the plaster

by decades of sunlight.

The girl with black hair looks at you

from her senior photo.

Her lipstick twists her lips

into a pile of coach-class tickets. 

Say the words

of commitment to the canvas

& it will sweat.

Say the body is meat

engulfing a stagnant river.

The river remains.

The river pendulums the days into silicone,

demerits the red dress

that the soprano wears

to replace the blown fuse in the basement. 

The body is the meat

the river paints

across the dirt.

The girl with black hair

sits still before the camera forever.

She becomes the cracked riverbank during the drought,

the fatty scent of oil paint fresh from the tube.

She winces at the icy slice

of river down her thighs. In the perfect walls

of sunlight she slaps her hands over her eyes.

The painter runs his knife

over the canvas & her hands

become the brick walls

of an abandoned warehouse,

of a grocery store, of an apartment building

just beginning to smolder.  She becomes

the river bottom refracted

through the water.  The image

degrades from painting to photograph

to reality & she is in the room with you,

handing you a box of lilac tissues.

She faces the window & speaks.

She is older now, her hair cut short.

She finds a dried marker uncapped by the tennis courts. 

There are two paintings of her

& in the first one she has no eyes,

like the blank white of marble statues.

At the worktable she fishes slugs of copper

from among the old telescopes. Lines the tools

beside the coffee cans of rusty nails.

Her mouth leaks the speech of conflict. She is watching

the flames engulf the apartment building.

She is backstage as the soprano chokes on a housefly.

As river water ribbons from her lipsticked mouth.

Decades later, after the funerals, she finds a sketch of herself

in a nurse’s uniform, drawn by the pallid kid

in the garden with black paint between his teeth.

But for now her handbag

is weighted with stolen silverware.

Her eyes pale into the houselights.

She slaps her mask on to keep the paint inside. 

The curtain falls in the middle of the act.

The river has entered the theater & it crouches

as still as a snapshot of a Dalmatian that ran away years ago.

In the second painting she is just about to snap

something with her teeth.  Her smile

strains the tendons in her neck.

Something has gone wrong: white skin

has been pasted onto the her throat

to hide the tattooed numbers &

it is beginning to peel;

the signature in the corner of the painting

squirms like a leech; neither garden nor desert,

neither photograph or painting. 

The paint covers your eyes & smears & smears

& will not stop smearing.

Wouldn’t it be nice to look

at something & to know it isn’t there.

Look until the palate knife

blurs your hands

into your face, just as a statue

knows no difference

between one extremity & another,

just as the photograph grows sticky

in the humidity of summer.

You smear into the walls

& the walls smear into you. 

The painting is a focal point

for the tingling after the gravity drops.

A roll of film you find

in the armoire inherited

from a long forgotten uncle.

But people are doing bad things to other people,

with their signatures & their buttons.

It is as if there was only one vial of blood left

& its gone gray.

People are doing bad things to other people

& I have no idea why. 

And on your birthday

eucalyptus trees deflate into sinking rowboats.

The bodies of the three boys

who hung themselves

were never taken down. 

The tendoned smile hums like stretched seal skin

beneath the floodlights that illuminate the crime scene.

On the couch beside the three boys,

she ties a scarf around her arm until her fingers turn blue.

And then your fingers turn blue,

but it’s only paint

& morning comes

every half hour now.

She unbuttons her shirt one button at a time

as the soprano sings & she remembers the boxed lunch

she ate in the basement of the hotel.

On the right side of her throat you can still see the scar.

She holds her hands to her face, just like the statue did.

This is how a human transgresses

in the trigger of the eye. How a woman

becomes a human.

The pallid boy’s pallid legs stick

out of his black shorts

like the brim of a baseball cap guarding the desert.

Bind the tug of war

to the tarred spruce,

evoke the knife-edge from the lice.

An echo attunes to invisibility.

The rasp is soprano, farmer’s lung

boiling over sterno.

Only in the fermata did the guard reveal his real name,

the names of the boys as their bodies

swung slightly in the still air.

The pallid boy has one rule: make something

sacred out of the knobs & lenses

that clutter the worktable.

Kill the sweat.

Drown the river in paint.

The creak of the rope

becomes a hawk.

The victim, miraculously still alive,

is taken to her parents’ house

where he wrens have nested

in the empty eye sockets of the dusty deer head.

She sulks in a photograph of the river,

she looks for the bookshelves through the frosted glass.

The river is named after her, a lasting fire.

At the funeral each set of eyes

in the crowd of thousands

strains toward the casket.