Troubled by Thoughts About Infinity and Oblivion, I Exit the Twombly Retrospective at Dusk and Walk the High Line with the Ghost of My Father, and Once Again in Thought About Rilke, Twombly's Orpheus Paintings and Fatherhood, I Consider the Inevitability of Creation and Loss
- Troubled by Thoughts About Infinity and Oblivion, I Exit the Twombly Retrospective at Dusk and Walk the High Line with the Ghost of My Father, and Once Again in Thought About Rilke, Twombly's Orpheus Paintings and Fatherhood, I Consider the Inevitability of Creation and Loss
Troubled by Thoughts About Infinity and Oblivion, I Exit the Twombly Retrospective at Dusk and Walk the High Line with the Ghost of My Father
This evening, the unknown waves its wand, and a beam of light disappearsinto the sky's black hat.The moon has never known its true home.The stars do not remember when they began their journey.Out of that forgetting, they begin their own making.Just like us.Soon the sun will take off its cape, and open a door to a place that is not there.Out of that absence, the questions:What black bones hang above the unseen?What name does the fire give to flame?What burns through existence to endlessness?We are not here long enough to believe in anything but language,and yet we know what awaits us is silence—somehow always rising above the darkness into darkness,always drawn to our own obscurity.Future self, I think of you arriving at our ending—last line on the last page— [End Page 176] the trace within the vanishing,the final sleight of hand in which everything disappears.Remember: the unseen is never truly empty.Despite erasure, the canvas never blank. [End Page 177]
Once Again in Thought About Rilke, Twombly's Orpheus Paintings and Fatherhood, I Consider the Inevitability of Creation and Loss
Scarred sky, the last beams bruised beneath the surface of stars. The whole world a contusion slowly transforming from one thing to the next— the one cell, the one life,always becoming two: What if it is the sun that follows the moon?How do we know we're not the bridle hard against the teeth of this life?Just because something has a saddle, it doesn't mean we should ride it.What would it take to be inside the music the cello did not know how to play? What would it take to say to the strings make me silent?What would it take for the skin to sing its own song of blood and blooming? [End Page 178] To know one truth is to know nothing.To wear your nothingness, well, now we're getting somewhere.I once believed I could be lifted by language out of language.I once believed the horsehooves in the distance was the ocean telling the rocks about water.I once believed loss would thread my mind's needle like a blind seamstress.But that was a long time ago.Now, I understand that time is nothing more than pure duration,& that the mind is a field of herons who have lost their way.Even so, I will let the entire lie down in my body's blue lightin hope that something will start to heal. [End Page 179]
Dean Rader has written, edited, and co-edited eleven books, including Works & Days (Truman State University Press, 2010), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize, Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague (Beacon, 2007), and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. At present, he is at work on poems that respond to the work of Cy Twombly. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.
