Daily Poem, Thursday, July 2, 2009

Okay, so I'm probably just rain-logged. But here it is. I woke up with the title this morning and tried to let it percolate for a few hours and then began writing. Who knows what this endless rain is doing to my brain....


Grasping Three-dimensionality


1.

It requires sunlight, so you imagine you see, by way of shadows in between things, the full picture. Imagine the cultivated cypresses along the avenues in Aix, and Cezanne, gripping his brushes and box, stomping down the street. See him wrench in and out of the pillared shade. He is thinking of the shadow of Mont Sainte Victoire. Or do you know the shapes of the cedars on the point at Manomet, how, in sunlight they cast their shade like a crew of toreadors might toss their capes with fanfare before el Toro, all in a row across the summer grass? Each one lays flat and full; the bullish sea foams around the rocks below them; the fragrant honey locusts on the bluff spill their flowers into little drifts.

2.
I know so little about three-dimensionality, except that it should be easy, but it’s hard to see in cubed things— Like Picasso’s women, disassembled and rearranged to illustrate the perceived complexities of everyone, leaving spaces where you might think they aren’t needed.
I tried to learn the art of throwing pots, but couldn’t master the wheel, that act of coaxing the clay around the air without letting it collapse on itself— couldn’t create that inside space that makes a thing a vessel.

3.
A man walks into a room and sees his lover about to take off her shoe. She’s leaning on the door frame for balance, and one hand is wriggling her heel as she pulls it, and the other hand is pressed against the doorframe, and her face is screwed up with concentration and her belly is round and a little droopy because she’s a little fat, and 10 years ago had the operation, and because she’s folded at the waist. And one leg’s bent across the other’s shin when she looks up and sees him, and she suddenly feels the way her hip is turned in and her belly’s sagging, and the way her ankle cracks when she pulls at the shoe. And he’s a little older than she is with less limber limbs and he probably should lose some weight. They’ve been finding each other for years now, for years and years— He moves around her to get to the kitchen, as he passes he asks if there’s any chocolate. She nods yes, pointing her shoe toward the worn green tin. And as she does the late day sun breaks through and lays down their merged shadows between them, like the many-thumbed space that’s left in the middle of puzzle where a piece is missing.