LEE KRASNER, YOUR “POLAR EXPEDITION” (1960)
Lee, I, too,
cannot sleep.
Night bleeds us, our body of
raw umber, we
sense flesh toughen, we
resist stars with only thoughts
pushing through a rich umber night and
the hand
breathlessly usurped by the body
bearing down on the brush.
I never, you said,
violate an inner rhythm.
The night is a rhythm –
staccato, dense, umber.
What loves us through these hours,
thickening through impasto –
simultaneously sandstone arcs
rise and protrude.
Painting, for me,
when it really happens is as
miraculous as any natural phenomenon –
as, say, a lettuce leaf.
A mother passes and the presence of others is
announced in vigorous
strokes. Is this
foreshadowing, a stoking of iron will?
And of the husband?
No one will let you forget.
But the palate must be restrained.
At this hour, red would lie and
green, too, would be coy and
yellow as shameless and vulgar as the
gossips who
will not let go of it.
Your arm will not have it –
pushing up and out,
wrapping around his as a
steadying force. Day is a
canvas stretched nightly for
clearer and clearer reflections,
looming large under a
night rapidly gorged.
Movement shapes the
breath and the beat is
umber-white-umber
and your grief is
heady, transformative in the
absence of bright color.
Lee, I cannot sleep with only the dead
drawn through and no child –
I, too, cannot hear the critics, but only
the work, only the change,
only the umber-white-umber-
white-umber.
Change is the
only constant.
AGNES MARTIN, YOUR “LEAF IN THE WIND” (1963) . . .*
I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and
leave me quiet even on this shore.
I stare at “Leaf in the Wind” with a softened gaze,
meditate on lines that reveal themselves between thoughts,
bold, buzzing, radiating beyond the grid.
How you courted stillness, how this came to you
fully-formed, like a
postage stamp from another country.
You’d translate this vision through the measured
walk of your pencil. I am learning to
court stasis so it is not torture, and the longer I
see no leaf, no rectangle, a
white sky never meant to emulate white sky
dissolving into a dirtied white light, the easier it is to
surrender – the eye panning over fog, delicately,
suggesting a spirit has passed.
What your mind must have held away from your hands
painstakingly drawing the grid, line by line.
Others would have no patience for an
elegy dreamed against sense. Today,
the lines subtly infused by the
spirit of a maker in the presence of a viewer,
the space between thoughts, mine and yours,
surfaces in the values of white –
even if I distance myself, I am learning to
fall into the white that recedes, pushing the graphite lines.
Sometimes through hard work the Dragon is
weakened. The resulting quiet is shocking. The work
proceeds quickly and without effort. A grid
whitens into wind, the lines begin rustling, I
arrive at your shore with no conception of time,
only leaves that are not leaves.
*All italics are quotes of Agnes Martin from various sources.
Vanesha Pravin is the author of Disorder (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Sarton Poetry Prize. She teaches at the University of California.