Making Modern

A cow skull painted fine-grained on canvas stares me down. Georgia O’Keeffe preferred the bones of cattle, skeletons of landscape, desert raw as the average nude. Her first kiss with Alfred Stieglitz must have chilled and grilled them both to the core. As I try to focus on paint rather than picture, museum visitors buff me with great expectations. “Making Modern,” an exhibit that deigns to impress, inhales but refutes or refuses my taste. Although I respect O’Keeffe’s grasp of her arid silence, I prefer the rougher strokes of Arthur Dove, the corrugations of Marsden Hartley, and the tough white factories of Charles Sheeler. Losing face to face, photography recedes from painting, yet retains a grip. Despite the triumph of the imagination, more skulls lurk in the desert to snap at the bare feet of pilgrims determined to meet their animal spirit guides.

A woman folds onto on the bench beside me. She scans a map of the museum and frowns in several shades of violet. She’s making herself modern. I think we’re both in a painting by Stuart Davis, one that will wrestle us to the floor in a tangle of competing forms and clashing hues. I wish O’Keeffe’s derisive skull could masticate Davis’s plastic forms and spit out neat squares of Rothko. Two shades of crimson glowing in a frame of burnt orange. Or electric blue and yellow framed in navy. I lean into my notebook to hide my face from the agony of the new. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe have filtered their sex lives through me, and I may not weather the toxic glow.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Gauguin’s greatest painting offers more length than depth. Flora flaunts toxic primal. Figures angle from here to there. Females inflate, men flatten. Fruit hovers in the middle ground. I have no choice but to shear from right to left. Syphilis bent Gauguin double and posed his models on edge. The overgrowth, instead of receding in the blast of his vision, approached. Frightened him into painting further and further. The erect central figure forms a pole around which the painting revolves. Sometimes I’m that figure, but often I’m someone else, even the old woman at the far left. A couple strolls through the gallery, chatting in Mandarin. A group of kids sizzles past, phone cameras snipping tiny shards of paint to bring home. Gauguin vandalized the imagination. He warped and twisted until it cried aloud. Then he fed it Tahiti. Or maybe Tahiti devoured his secret organs, those that exuded the oils he used to mix his colors. I can’t read the painting because the ocher and brown repel my gaze and then replace me with my Tahitian ego grazing lascivious mangoes and breadfruit. I can’t be inside and outside the painting at once, can I? Gauguin is still laughing over my childhood, which when I first saw his great painting I almost found the courage to dedicate to myself.

The Cambridge Water Supply

The track around the reservoir

at dusk sports a dozen joggers

and a pair of women rehashing

Belmont’s loudest divorce. Walking

so tenderly I won’t bruise

the faint violet sea of light,

I admire a round brick water house,

grass sward capping and concealing

the water itself. No way to drown

in the Cambridge water supply,

which simmers under lock and key

and can’t readily evaporate

in gruesome September heat.

Not that I’m looking to drown

or even swim, but a glimpse

of open water would cool me

for a moment, empower me

to review the life I’ve spent

stalking the Chimera to snuff

its fire breath and poke out its eyes.

The joggers gasp and pant and sweat.

The women snarl as they agree

that she should have demanded more

alimony from that creep, drained

his bank account and shoveled him

headlong into the furnace

of his neo-pubic desires.

Neighboring houses crackle

with ordinary lives. Pages

turn under lamplight. A bible

surrenders its angry subtext,

a novel coughs up a character

a reader might wish to befriend.

The evening’s first stars fall, snuffing

in the reservoir’s secret depths.

I should take notes; but warped

by this walk, my handwriting

might strangle itself and render                           

the track around the reservoir

not as a circle but series

of loops, entangling me in syntax

too faintly violet to parse.