Noah Warren

More than a hundred dollars of them. It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them in. Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my dining table— each fresh-faced, extending delicate leaves into the crush. Didn't I watch children shuffle strictly in line, cradle candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers, chanting Latin—just to fashion Sevilla's Easter? Wasn't I sad? Didn't I use to go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage raising bursting violet spears?—Look, the afternoon dies as night begins in the heart of the lilies and smokes up their fluted throats until it fills the room and my lights have to be not switched on. And in close darkness the aroma grows so sweet, so strong, that it could slice me open. It does. I know I'm not the only one whose life is a conditional clause hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room and the tremble of my phone. I'm not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind. When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for decades. God, I am so transparent. So light.

The Constellations are a harmoniously composed series of 23 gouaches that Miró painted to escape the trauma of the war years. — The Joan Miró Foundation We’ve all gouached. Haven’t we? Pollock lashed stretched canvas that was Nude. Was said to call his Ruth prude and he spat chew in a coffee can and shat bloodily in the can. When I was twenty I spent three hours in a room with the Free- Spirited Types moving from one inviting orifice to the welcome of another. I was lost in my wood, savage and stern. But also I understood that when it was later and I was wiser I could never forgive Herr Pfizer. My father said we’ve all got an East River. He had a tenuous web of veins for a liver. His loss. Literally. Mom’s impatient art was proved to be the most effective part of her mothering: you should see her rich greens well up in the power of the middle and grow lean as they colonize the crusted edges. My love for her is impregnable. Pity Miró, moonblind, weary on the rocky coast of Portugal, walking cliff paths and getting lost. His quest for childish wonder has bent him and riddled his skin before its time. Put this together with that! Paint it yellow! Murk the sky with banks of Periwinkle and Snow. Gouache a widened eye low on the right, so it can behold the left and the night.

Do you remember when you began to travel? It lent you this astonishing lens and you kept a journal That rode in your breast pocket like a stone, There you wrote “Limoges — ” and “Altenkirchen”; And when you saw a peasant, kissed, or passed out — Died for twenty seconds — in the heat on the hill above Marseille you would rush out the notebook and make a note — Sometimes just an x in the top right corner — And ideally you would brood about that later. Which led slowly to the dark hot bar Where you enjoy a glass of beer across from the Winter Palace in summer. In the rose-and-blue windows of the basilica Today radiant burghers stood and learned Mercy in a circle Around Stephen, recognized By the pebble enthroned in his skull and the scarlet ooze. While in your system the amphetamines progress. The idea is they’ll give you heart to haul yourself up and cross The limestone plaza. And when at the gate of the place You pay you can enter the Palace.