/ Poetry /
But I am not a Buddhist—even that is denied me. My spirit needs matter—a medium—which resists the peaceful [...] Unlike a monk, my self or mind-self is not my medium—I cannot contemplate myself into myself.
– Philip Guston in a letter to Ross Feld, September 1978
The golden profile of that boulder:
A lion facing the rising sun.
Like a rube in the Uffizi
I wander through the abstract canvases
of nature offering my glosses, my impressions,
turning raw beauties into mere familiarities;
or worse, like a critic offering mere philosophies,
reversing the course of art.
There’s Aunt Sally in that tree trunk
upside down, head buried in the ground,
her spindly legs splayed to the sky.
Or the Monkey King imprisoned
in that cliff-face for kalpas
grinning against the rain
with charm and mischief.
Didn’t Michaelangelo claim that he was just
releasing forms trapped in adamantine?
Or was that Rodin?
I can hear Ruskin and Rothko tut-tutting
my pathetic infractions. Still,
I can’t get over it—those spitting images:
that lion’s gray-green mane gilded in the morning sun,
Monkey’s inane petrotechnics, provocative and protective,
the dark mossy bark in the crotch of Aunt Sally’s hemlock thighs.
I come back to Guston’s late boots and cigarettes,
and his bulbous horizontal congregations
with light bulbs flipping us on and off:
tragic cartoons for the chaos of our chunky lives.