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in memory of the painters Paul Klee and Paul Terence Feeley I The painter’s eye follows relation out. His work is not to paint the visible, He says, it is to render visible. Being a man, and not a god, he stands Already in a world of sense, from which He borrows, to begin with, mental things Chiefly, the abstract elements of language: The point, the line, the plane, the colors and The geometric shapes. Of these he spins Relation out, he weaves its fabric up So that it speaks darkly, as music does Singing the secret history of the mind. And when in this the visible world appears, As it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree, All haunted here and there with the human face, It happens as by accident, although The accident is of design. It is because Language first rises from the speechless world That the painterly intelligence Can say correctly that he makes his world, Not imitates the one before his eyes. Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shores, The terrifying forests where nightfall Enfolds a lost and tired traveler. And hence the careless crowd deludes itself By likening his hieroglyphic signs And secret alphabets to the drawing of a child. That likeness is significant the other side Of what they see, for his simplicities Are not the first ones, but the furthest ones, Final refinements of his thought made visible. He is the painter of the human mind Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness That is in things, and not the things themselves. For such a man, art is an act of faith: Prayer the study of it, as Blake says, And praise the practice; nor does he divide Making from teaching, or from theory. The three are one, and in his hours of art There shines a happiness through darkest themes, As though spirit and sense were not at odds. II The painter as an allegory of the mind At genesis. He takes a burlap bag, Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher. He paints it black because, as he has said, Everything looks different on black. Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe, And black because its volume is the void Before the stars were. At the painter’s hand Volume becomes one-sidedly a surface, And all his depths are on the face of it. Against this flat abyss, this groundless ground Of zero thickness stretched against the cold Dark silence of the Absolutely Not, Material worlds arise, the colored earths And oil of plants that imitate the light. They imitate the light that is in thought, For the mind relates to thinking as the eye Relates to light. Only because the world Already is a language can the painter speak According to his grammar of the ground. It is archaic speech, that has not yet Divided out its cadences in words; It is a language for the oldest spells About how some thoughts rose into the mind While others, stranger still, sleep in the world. So grows the garden green, the sun vermilion. He sees the rose flame up and fade and fall And be the same rose still, the radiant in red. He paints his language, and his language is The theory of what the painter thinks. III The painter’s eye attends to death and birth Together, seeing a single energy Momently manifest in every form, As in the tree the growing of the tree Exploding from the seed not more nor less Than from the void condensing down and in, Summoning sun and rain. He views the tree, The great tree standing in the garden, say, As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight, Growing its green height from the dark watered earth, And as suspended weightless in the sky, Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head. He follows through the flowing of the forms From the divisions of the trunk out to The veinings of the leaf, and the leaf’s fall. His pencil meditates the many in the one After the method in the confluence of rivers, The running of ravines on mountainsides, And in the deltas of the nerves; he sees How things must be continuous with themselves As with whole worlds that they themselves are not, In order that they may be so transformed. He stands where the eternity of thought Opens upon perspective time and space; He watches mind become incarnate; then He paints the tree. IV These thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee, About how he in our hard time might stand to us Especially whose lives concern themselves with learning As patron of the practical intelligence of art, And thence as model, modest and humorous in sufferings, For all research that follows spirit where it goes. That there should be much goodness in the world, Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm, And that it all goes down in the dust after a while, This is a subject for the steadiest meditations Of the heart and mind, as for the tears That clarify the eye toward charity. So may it be to all of us, that at some times In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail, And when impatience in the street and still despair at home Divide the mind to rule it, there shall be some comfort come From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind, As the painter dreaming in the scholar’s house, His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought, The same dream that then flared before intelligence When light first went forth looking for the eye.

Someone called in a report that she had seen a man painting in the dark over by the pond. A police car was dispatched to go in- vestigate. The two officers with their big flashlights walked all around the pond, but found nothing suspicious. Hatcher was the younger of the two, and he said to Johnson, "What do you think he was painting?" Johnson looked bemused and said, "The dark, stupid. What else could he have been painting?" Hatcher, a little hurt, said, "Frogs in the Dark, Lily- pads in the Dark, Pond in the Dark. Just as many things exist in the dark as they do in the light." Johnson paused, exasperated. Then Hatcher added, "I'd like to see them. Hell, I might even buy one. Maybe there's more out there than we know. We are the police, after- all. We need to know."

Sitting between the sea and the buildings He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait. But just as children imagine a prayer Is merely silence, he expected his subject To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush, Plaster its own portrait on the canvas. So there was never any paint on his canvas Until the people who lived in the buildings Put him to work: “Try using the brush As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait, Something less angry and large, and more subject To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.” How could he explain to them his prayer That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas? He chose his wife for a new subject, Making her vast, like ruined buildings, As if, forgetting itself, the portrait Had expressed itself without a brush. Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer: “My soul, when I paint this next portrait Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.” The news spread like wildfire through the buildings: He had gone back to the sea for his subject. Imagine a painter crucified by his subject! Too exhausted even to lift his brush, He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer Now, of putting ourselves on canvas, Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!” Others declared it a self-portrait. Finally all indications of a subject Began to fade, leaving the canvas Perfectly white. He put down the brush. At once a howl, that was also a prayer, Arose from the overcrowded buildings. They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings; And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

“Painting a wave requires no system,” The painter said, painting a wave. “Systems may get you flotsam and jetsam, Seaweed and so forth. But never a wave.” There was a scroll or fine-lined curve On the canvas first, and then what looked Like hair flying or grayish nerves, Which began to move as the painter worked. “Painting the sea is a lot of trouble; It never stops still for a moment, so I try to make it internal, mental, As though I stopped it, then let it go.” Something began to pulse and tumble Out of the brushes, the ink, the chalk; A long black line commenced to tremble, Then, like a fishline, started to jerk . . . With what at the end? “I think I’ve caught it.” A drop of water hung by a hair. “If I could only stop it a minute!” The drop began to race somewhere, Spreading out in every direction, A bird of thread, caught in a storm, Trying to say, “Connection! Action!” But in the end it was very calm. Soon there was water under water, And over the sand a sun . . . a moon? Who could have seen that wave of water One night ago? Or a thousand and one? Who could have seen the lid of water With its thin mascara of buoys and corks, With its lined horizon’s distant glimmer Of maybe a skyline like New York’s? Now there will be that morning evening Tide dyeing the water’s pulse, The wave drying in ink.The Wave. Moving, momentous, motionless.

It wasn’t working. Didn’t look back. Needed something else. So I went out. After lunch I saw it in a different light, like a thing emerging from behind a fever bush, something reaching the senses with the smell of seaweed boiling, and as visible as yellow snowdrops on black earth. Tasted it too, on the tongue Jamaica pepper. To the touch, a velvet flower. Dragging and scumming, I gave myself to it stroke after stroke. It kept coming in bits and fits, fragments and snags. I even heard it singing but in the wrong key like a deranged bird in wild cherries, having the time of its life.

—displayed in the Weaverville Museum It is the picture of a man who dreams at night, his dreams a cartoon color he can’t forget in his blue cell: a fork chases a hard-boiled egg across the smooth paper, cheered on by an angry alarm clock. The clock rings and the artist knows it is morning even though the iron cell is in a basement with no windows. In the center of the painting the devil blows a whistle and his pitchfork drips blood. Above in the night a man has taken off in a Buck Rogers spaceship heading for a yellow one-eyed moon. He grips the steering wheel in the open cockpit and doesn’t look back. In a lower corner under a naked tree a satyr sits and plays his pan-flute. The notes weave all around the painting, twist around a girl dancing in veils. The man who dreams all this pulls at his covers, drowses at the bottom of the painting. The man who painted this died in his dreams.

A lot of the painting here is painting over. Can everyone at the back hear over everyone? Everyone is a blast of light seeping across the film. All day high toothy windows whiten in flashlight. We are much like we were: five times a day. Things don’t change that much in five centuries. For ten centuries before it was faces. Those were faces, yes. They were angels. The gold mosaic is as fine as an angel’s velvet wing. The Christian building is spongy yellow, ochre, gold.

All the museums are afraid of me, Because each time I spend a whole day In front of a painting The next day they announce The painting’s disappeared. Every night I’m caught stealing In another part of the world, But I don’t even care About the bullets hissing toward my ear, And the police dogs who are onto The smell of my tracks, Better than lovers who know The perfume of their mistress. I talk to the canvases that put my life in danger, Hang them from clouds and trees, Step back for some perspective. You can easily engage the Italian masters in conversation. What noise of colors! And hence I’m caught Very quickly with them, Seen and heard from a distance As if I had a parrot in my arms. The hardest to steal is Rembrandt: Stretch a hand out, there’s darkness — The terror seizes you, his men don’t have bodies, Just closed eyes in dark cellars. Van Gogh’s canvases are insane, They whirl and roll their heads, And you have to hold on tight With both hands, They’re sucked by a force from the moon. I don’t know why, Breughel makes me want to cry. He wasn’t any older than me, But they called him the old man Because he knew it all when he died. I try to learn from him too But can’t stop my tears From flowing over the gold frames When I run off with The Four Seasons under my armpits. As I was saying, every night I steal one painting With enviable dexterity. But the road’s very long So I’m caught in the end And get home late at night Tired and torn to shreds by dogs Holding a cheap imitation in my hands.

Who, who had only seen wings, could extrapolate the skinny sticks of things birds use for land, the backward way they bend, the silly way they stand? And who, only studying birdtracks in the sand, could think those little forks had decamped on the wind? So many paired things seem odd. Who ever would have dreamed the broad winged raven of despair would quit the air and go bandylegged upon the ground, a common crow?

Coinage of the not-yet-wholly- hardened custodians of public health, as health is roughly measured in the rougher parts of Dearborn. Meaning, how many parents, when things get bad, are wearing what they’ve slept in when they come to pick up the kids at school. The best of talk, said someone once, is shop talk: we can go to it as to a well. But manifolds and steering racks are going the way of the wells—offshore— so the-nifty-thing-you-do- with-the-wrench-when-the-foreman- has-sped-the-line-up has become a ghastly shorthand for despair among the people you are paid to help. Despair, sometimes, of helping. In the winter dawn a decade and a half ago, we’d gather around the school bus stop—the unshaved fathers, mothers, dogs, the siblings in their snowsuits—so the children bound for Johnson Elementary might have a proper sending-off. The privileged of the earth, in our case: words and stars and molecules were all our care, a makeshift village blessed with time and purpose. And a school bus stop, to make it seem like life. By far my favorites were the Russian mathematicians: bathrobes hanging below their parkas, cigarettes scattering ash, their little ones for the moment quite forgotten, they would cover the walls of the shelter with what to most of us was Greek but was no doubt of urgent consequence for quantum fields. So filled with joy: their permanent markers on the brick. And then the bus, and then the children off without us and our little human pretext gone. Fragile the minutes. Fragile the line between wonder and woe. The poet when he wrote about our parents in the garden gave them love and rest and mindfulness. But first he gave them honest work.