Brushes With The Dark Law

To be published Sept. 25, 2024 in Black Horse Review. (Some details from, and the poem is herein dedicated to, Jascha Kessler, my poetry teacher at UCLA 1972, who was a friend of Jackson Pollock in a legendary New York in the early 50s).

Without Measure

 
My days scatter sums
in the long gallery of matter.
 
They drop on a scattergram
like paint ripens a Pollock canvas,
 
tabula rasa newly stretched
and waiting on the cold studio floor.
 
These wet accidents and raw intentions
are hung too soon in the Palace of Thinking Arts.
 
The show, in fact, is called “Soon”
and its catalog is blank too – empty.
 
But my canvas stays down, ducks for cover.
I guess I’m blessed to track the inchoate picture
 
of those bar graphs, x & y axes
carefully plotting a colorful existential dialectic.
 
Time is the sweetest mystery, solve for X
(though lately the brain refuses
 
to retrieve the name of Jackson Pollock.)
The body’s incomplete artifice; too late to live on pure spec.
 
The algebra of fame and its 21 grams tricks the light;
we weigh the emptiness and show how we got the answer.
 
Yearning? Fuck, don’t you yearn for a time
when science took the knee to nihilism? When accident was sacred?
 
***
 
I guess I should have lived in the early 50s,
Greenwich Village, lending
Pollock pocket change for beers
and accepting No. 31
to resolve the debt.
 
Then I could have lived
in À bout de souffle
 
or walked rainy streets in Paris to/with Miles Davis.
Horizontal stripes on a sailor’s shirt,
 
cigarette smoke rising in straight edge from ashes to sky.
Half my day adds to crime, anyway.
 
***
 
Y plots how to break the screens
or otherwise survive erasure.  But this desire for another life
 
doesn’t give me a blank canvas
and the one I have
 
remains flat on what looks like concrete
waiting for another drop of time
 
without measure.
Temps perdu ready for a deep breath:
 
X axis in.
Y counts the number who will unplug.
 
Round off the mystery
and fold the test in the half your heart hides.
 
Show how you got your answer?
Ha, you’re shot in the street like a dog.
 
Frame it, graph it, measure it just so;
the wild resists, in curation and celluloid.
 
Don’t you lean back to avoid
reading the tombstone too soon?
 
Count on accidents.