Poetry |

“Meditation on Comprehension,” “Meditation on Direction,” “Octet” & “Looking at Cy Twombly’s Cold Stream and Feeling The Heat”

Meditation on Comprehension

Cy Twombly, Nini’s Painting, 1971

 

Our lives are illegible,

why not this page?

Obsession and exploration on an endless loop —

[what are these marks?]

I’m tired of typing the word marks 

I want to write the word word —

[though words are themselves marks of their own failure]

Slash, scrape, sketch —

everything always a trace toward understanding.

Query:

Is it possible to record what we do not see?

Is it possible to see what we do not read?

Is it possible to read what we cannot write?

Proposition:

All seeing is a form of believing:

All belief is a mode of feeling:

All feeling is a way of thinking:

What I don’t understand / still might read //

What I am unable to read / I may still understand.

 

 

 

Cy Twombly, Nini’s Painting (1971) / © Cy Twombly Foundation

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Meditation on Direction

Cy Twombly, Orion III (1968)

 

 

More wave than scribble —

Why is it that Twombly always seems to be writing with his wrong hand?

a mode

of visual music: emanations, vibrations —

aural made visible:

Why is it the gods are never farther away than when we are near?

Sky-sliced and star-stamped,

descent our shape and our source.

O to live among the livid, the dead. 

Everything slanted —

even the path

of the path.

 

Cy Twombly, Orion III (1968) / © Cy Twombly Foundation

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Octet

Cy Twombly, Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) (1964)

 

page                 scrape              sketch              sky                  fear                  ladder

 

circle                scar                   row                blue                white                  fish

 

dot                  dash                black               wax                 battle                   sex

 

tally                  spear               mark               cut                  paint                 filth

 

skin                  death               mix                 slit                   slash                  touch

 

light                   loss                   x                   bliss                  hero                  year

 

blood                 sail                 wind                  oar                 spume              wheel

 

spew                  epic                wash                devour               write                 erase

 

Cy Twombly, Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) (1964) / © Cy Twombly Foundation

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Looking at Cy Twombly’s Cold Stream and Feeling the Heat

Cy Twombly, Cold Stream (1966)

 

The line,

like the river,

does not know to stop.

Nothing on this earth is straight —

not the sky, the sea, the self, the stream —

Even colors curve,

cold in the light of their swerve

toward the other —

I think of you, Love,

 in the blankness beyond the beyond:

our motion the very soul of shape,

the flashing water,

drawing us in —

 

Cy Twombly, Cold Stream (1966) / © Cy Twombly Foundation

Contributor
Dean Rader

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored eleven books, including Works & Days, awarded the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, named a Best Book of the Year by the Barnes & Noble Review, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Recent work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, BOMB, Ploughshares, Poetry Review (UK), and Best of the Net. His work has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, the Headlands Center for the Arts and the MacDowell Foundation. In 2019, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and this year, he was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a contributing editor of On The Seawall.

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