The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane

Keeping Afloat

Keeping Afloat Art must say“Yes”to existence, despite every obstacle. —Louis Dudek Alone in the glass-roofed swimming pool I alternate back-stroke and breast-stroke, back and forth, wrapped in a single, vivid blue of sky and tiles. Outside a pine, with a painter’s stroke, the “Yes”of art, sheds red straw on the glass. The simplest pleasures carry us. Eden begins with primaries unsubtle, like these chlorine blues identical with the harsh glaze of the ancient shards from Inanna’s desert temple, or mosque blue, like the hard, hot sky, or Mary’s blue, when the stars come out, and the first fires are lit. That snapshot, taken before the war, of the ruinskeeper with his child and their tiny fire: it showed a room scooped in that shattered temple’s wall, a cave of shadows and tenderness— like a De La Tour. But now? I can not bear to think of it. Life keeps sending us messages. April in Paris; the Roman baths reduced to charred, eroded brick and bullet scars, in a park where the pigeons seemed cancerous— their bloody feet left on the sand maimed cuneiform. The tourists alone were not dressed in black. 68 / The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand  In this warm pool I loiter, back and forth, a sort of lazy pendulum unwinding time, mechanical— like the battery scuba diver pacing the petshop tank with its plastic “weeds” and its “treasure chest,” and three live neon tetra making rounds. Cozy, they seemed, as used to seem those glowing rooms we liked to spy on from the El, late winter evenings: snows turned orange, Christmas trees drying on fire escapes. Cozy, as in the photograph of the kids wrapped in a sleeping bag above a sidewalk heating vent… or those boys who boarded the oil drum, drifted out and were seen off shore, once, calling for help. As in Blackwood’s etching: the empty boat, an empty, pack-ice harbour, oars. A sign in the bus-shelter asks: Do You Know Where Your Children Are? We can not hold our minds to loss. Blackwood paints bright colours now: a door to nowhere, whose jammed lock and horse-shoe luck change surfaces, showing their battered primaries, reds, yellows, blues— unsubtle, soothing, beautiful. The same, closed door. The Poetry of M. Travis Lane / 69 70 / The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand  But never the same. That National Geographic fIlm of the Amazonian falls which rush to their white pit where a rainbow like a fortune wheel hangs centre-most: you can throw nothing into it. The wind blows back your breath. Dizzy and full of meaning, as at Wells those jigsaw windows where the glass would not replace and was put back stable in disorder: wings, arms, horses, reds, and blues, and yellows, irreparable conundrum we once understood and then forgot. We like to see the patterns: those toy boats circling the zoo pond where black swans nest in the centre island, trash-filled thicket where smashed egg and mangled foetus, the quick calls of mating birds, cluster together, unreachable… The patterns we see imply a wheel: fortune’s, or continuity’s. It seems to give us room. And Art says “Yes.” Like Cornell’s Heraclitean bus stop which proclaimed “The Way Up Is the Same as the Way Down.” Is pattern there, even when we can’t sense it out? We lean upon simplicities as on this pool a swimmer floats, half-dreaming, half at prayer. Does the story run forever, or just out? ...