Pollock's Paintings
Pollock’s Paintings
This may be music
moving through the night air
looking for a Mozart,
or screaming for some as-yet unrealized
instrument to be invented.
Jealousy, perhaps, making its way
toward the hand that will become
a fist—
or the drift
of neuro-transmitters
moving across synapses
in search of
the right molecules to bind with.
This could be a supernova remnant
with its gaseous eruptions spewing forth
particulate matter,
pocked by anti-matter,
irradiated by gamma-rays—
or anything, any force of the natural
or preternatural world, micro- or macroscopic,
perhaps wholly
imagined
and without analog,
art creating itself.
Some say Pollock shows us chaos,
its ubiquity, its visual flippancies,
the liquid migrations
of primordial stuff
as it spurts and curls and falls
through currents
too minute for us
to measure—
or the pandemonium of an entropic mind.
Nothing demonic or divine
in this, this everywhere
and always that spells
its way through us, or we through it.
We take his gift of motion, memory, light
that reaches out
through endless
ropes and strings and loops,
probes of paint
shot forth or flung
in the dance
of human energy.
Perhaps this is Dickinson’s divine insanity,
the mental traveler’s dream,
the journeys of a million lives
inscribed in a lexicon of line, color, texture,
an infinite series of
relations graphically
displayed.
It is unfathomable, this wordlessness
finding a technique,
or as Duras says— As distant from words
as the unknown object
of an objectless love—
possibilities visible in the abstract.
From: Brave Disguises
Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2002