Paintbrushes, Sketch
Larry Fagin sent me a side-stapled thing with a drawing of a horse (and a flower and a green-hood’d unidentifiable) in color’d inks by Guillaume Apollinaire for a cover—Sylvia Gorelick’s Seven Poems for Bill Berkson (Kostro Editions, 2009). Here’s one of the pieces:
BRIEF NOTE (10 A.M.)Swift-script’d, just like that. It shoots down the page so quickly (half-notational, effortless) that one’s apt to miss some of the details that so exactly depict the punchy rambunctious constraint (an indelicate balance, that) of wanting to get the hell out of some kind of aftermath: that risqué horse of morning “bridled . . . at the ready and wailing / for it” (not willing, not waiting, though each echoes within); that prissy-mouthful “with muted poise / to explain”; or that terrific short-i’d restraint at the end—the clipped off soundings of “limber,” “insist,” “hit,” “precision,” rolling into the relief and roundness of “& the idol’s fall” (a fullness anticipated only by “bull’s”). Some of the natural ease of O’Hara, certainly, though I recall, too—at the moment of “I fancy / I will never be myself / again / but I must!”—Tom Clark’s lines in “Like musical instruments,” “You feel like // You’ll never feel like touching anything or anyone / Again / And then you do.”
invest in emptiness
and wake up in the chelsea
where everything tastes
like musk and bridled morning
at the ready and wailing
for it
because four consecutive
piano keys are broken stiff
and an arm of the chair
falls off
I fancy
I will never be myself
again
but I must!
and go on living
with muted poise
to explain: there are no
mementos
but charm enough
in this city for one person
and no one will take it
from her
being angled & limber
isn’t being
alive
I insist
and hit a
bull’s eye with jackhammer
precision
& the idols fall
Without straining, without arming herself with the far-fetch’d and uncommon, Gorelick consistently manages to slay in these pieces, mostly through startling imagery, though, too, through “mere” pacing. Look at the beginning to “A Letter”:
the way statesThe mystery of how “states / fall in line” (states like Georgia? states of being?) (lining up? perishing?) relating to some unspicify’d meeting. The pronoun shift adding to an unsettling sense of who’s present. Not “what / love is” but “what / love that is.” Later in “A Letter”: “Spanish radio is a gushing panic” and “I / feel gone / again // like a little apparatus.” Terrific moments. And throughout. Things like “to humble myself / I call myself / particular”; “a bouquet isn’t useful / until it’s written down”; “I’ll make it / quick / or be pin-stunned / like a boxer / (in heels) // give me a break / you fake / or facedown / you’ll follow.” If call’d to point to a weakness, I’d probably suggest the narrative (“I went out to steal a modest piece / of black & classless warmth”; “busted at sixteen!”) of “How to Progress” gets a little self-glorying in tone, and predictable in story (though I do like moments, time “passing / like a fattish fog” and the end, “I make up my mind / to go along with certain chairs & tables / in certain bookstores / until they stop playing / hard bop”). Nobody needs to become a Rimbaldian patsy for some “poetic” way of being. (Nobody needs to tell anybody how to behave).
fall in line and one
sits beside you
and I
lose my breath
can’t tell what
love that is
—
A YEAR
XXXVI
Minimal’s the stitchery
in the oil-
cloth great-coat
of time, is
how one sentence
goes, the way
sentences do &
must, preternaturally whole,
with no oily
slippage, no lingual
wear and tear
ever, the rocks!
Or four wind-
lash’d pedestrians jut
out into a
crosswalk, in saturated
Cibachrome, a photograph
made precisely to
make the present
no longer possible.
So rapt is
that one girl
in yellow rubber
boots—it’s raining
hard!—her pinch’d
face lacerated by
hurry—all arrangement
and suasion cuts
to the uncurb’d
curl of water
thrown up by
the speeding yellow
taxi, midair, undrenching.
