Poetry

I.
 
A poem is a mathematical problem, its craquelure.
 
Tonight, I will dream of Pissarro again, and look for him a proof.
He will paint our Montmartre in time, its thronging crowds.
Along the boulevard, its tall and naked trees. The cars looking like toys.
The sky receding into an unwritten script, a reduction.
An empirical understanding.
Of the other voice, akin to another person in the room.
 
He will overlay the archivist, who will be included as an afterthought.
The pedestrians will be walking east, inconsequential to his canvas.
 
Did we dream the same dream last night?
 
Art is, indeed, a revelation to the artist, himself a Euclidean space.
Art engenders a cruel but liberating double bind.
Art becomes the artist’s unleavened burden. And an ethos, trembling.
Its artifice an evolution. A created voice, that’s what we agreed on.
 
 
II.
 
Such consciousness, distilling into space and time, their fetters.
This, after I popped cubes of brown sugar into my mouth.
They melted within seconds, each moment like a digon.
The way Pissarro’s chatting women seemed part of their surroundings.
As light a mood as the calm sea behind them.
 
If there’s a cupped voice, it is as much mine. As angular, an inception.
Perhaps an anthropomorphized creature. Swimming. In mid-stream.
 
I dreamt of Pissarro painting Eragny, within a Penrose tile.
There was a burly woman with strong arms.
She had an orange blouse. She wore a scarf that arched in the wind.
There were haystacks everywhere, like gilded mountains.
 
Have these striae become an open letter to every kind of person?
And have you become a revolving point, an Archimedean spiral?
 
A centrifugal force around which these letters need their anchor?
 
 
* This poem is a reprint. It was first anthologized as the winner of the Cyclamens and Swords Publishing Poetry Prize.