You are a character
made entirely of desire.
I don’t want a car
or a career or even a house
with a flight of stairs
necessarily.
I would like to live, though.
The most unattainable commodity: a plot
with no last page. You’re very abstract.
Blue growths and blue fields
on a canvas. Of Joan Mitchell’s
Les Bluets, Lydia Davis wrote
that in her confrontation of
marks seemingly without symbol,
she understood she couldn’t understand.
And that was a revelation.
When I look at the painting I think
I’m seeing Mitchell
as she builds her own seeing,
closely and carefully, trial
and error. Which is how I make
myself. Reanimating
a memory by moving
back & forth over it until
the familiar accumulates
into the unrecognizable.
You’ll probably never meet me.
We never see
the same thing twice.