American Flamingo

The Rose

77 The Rose Fix an orgasm so it stays? I don’t know. It would probably kill you. How do you represent one to a world dying for one, a world that won’t admit such a thing exists? You build a frame, a strong frame. You get some plaster, some rags. You imagine a rose opening that goes on opening, but the petals don’t fall, the petals disappear, leaving strong bright lines radiating through layers and layers of time outward from and inward to a definite center. Jay De Feo wanted to make something that “had a center to it.” She worked on it every day in her apartment for eight years. It was eleven feet high and weighed 2,300 lbs. when she was evicted and had to stop her work. They had to get a crane and a crew of strong men to remove it from the upstairs apartment. Bruce Conner made a movie of the event, and in it Jay De Feo looks sad. Up you go little smoke. Dear Landlord, Go to Hell. Where is the brave and beautiful Jay De Feo now? They say the paint she worked with killed her. I don’t know. Jay De Feo made Doctor Jazz, Applaud the Black Fact, Deathwish, and then she made The Rose. { 78 What is the right music for this? Slow blues, smoky jazz, mourning dove in dusk? Dust and dirt will do, will do as they have always done— hold us up, cover us, muddy the water, soften the light. Through the dust I see a sunflower and a woman walking away. Light steps in fine dirt, raked and smoothed, soft to cushion the fall of figs in the orchard, gone orchard of the San Joaquin. Naked in late afternoon light, barefoot on the soft dirt, down a row of fig trees loaded with fruit about to fall, she walks—no way to describe those steps without stumbling. She walks and then she runs, gone in her pleasure, her pain, gone down a long converging row of silvery contorted bodies in the last orchard, and each step raises a small cloud of golden dust I lean into trying to coax another transubstantiation, dust into water, pallor into blush, a closed unimagined space into the rose. ...