Po Chu-i

Beside the Pond, Under Bamboo

A path winds past brambleweave fence and simple home,
jade-green: ten acres of idle dwelling, a pond gracing half.

After eating my fill and dozing refreshed at the window,
I wander off under the trees, alone, my feet light as air,

for water clarifies the spirit no less than a perfect friend,
and bamboo is a master that frees the mind to emptiness.

Why worry about that world of people, why plague mind
and ruin eyes in search of a kindred spirit here or there?

Po Chü-i
(translated by David Hinton)

El Colegio Nacional de La Plata

El Colegio Nacional de La Plata... a symposium on interdisciplinary education, from a posted photo. But just what is it that Iike so much here? The woman's expression, certainly, in parallel with the authoritative bemusement of the man with the microphone--held almost delicately, as if a certain refinement were required. The rumpled suit--a daily costume, it seems, his thoughts on other matters? But it's her face I return to, each time--a locus of feeling.

Bachillerato in 1962, La Plata, Argentina, Quinto Tercero--my own class. A long time ago. I wonder about Professor Agavios and his lectures on Cosmographía ("Se toma una esfera celeste tan grande como se quiera...") and also Profesor Escalante--La Literatura Europea. Baudelaire, Charles Peguy...Edgar Allen Poe...

Solano, morning...

Red-orange neon of Clean-Living Cleaners, under the eaves of the 7-eleven... View through window of the copyshop, particularly beautiful on a gray morning. Interior light against run of darkened sky... Final scene in Antonioni's The Passenger, a town late afternoon, somewhere in Spain, setting sun, lamplight from within. "A lantern pushing away the darkness , such a friendly image..."

Autumn Thoughts

Autumn Thoughts, Sent Far Away

We share all these disappointments of failing
autumn a thousand miles apart. This is where

autumn wind easily plunders courtyard trees,
but the sorrows of distance never scatter away.

Swallow shadows shake out homeward wings.
Orchid scents thin, drifting from old thickets.

These lovely seasons and fragrant years falling
lonely away— we share such emptiness here.

Po Chü-i

(David Hinton translation)

Larry Levis: Those Graves in Rome

Those Graves In Rome
There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. Here, for example, is
The Piazza Navona, & here is his narrow room
Overlooking the Steps & the crowds of sunbathing
Tourists. And here is the Protestant Cemetery
Where Keats & Joseph Severn join hands
Forever under a little shawl of grass
And where Keats's name isn't even on
His gravestone, because it is on Severn's,
And Joseph Severn's infant son is buried
Two modest, grassy steps behind them both.
But you'd have to know the story--how bedridden
Keats wanted the inscription to be
Simple, & unbearable: "Here lies one
Whose name is writ in water." On a warm day,
I stood here with my two oldest friends.
I thought, then, that the three of us would be
Indissoluble at the end, & also that
We would all die, of course. And not die.
And maybe we should have joined hands at that
Moment. We didn't. All we did was follow
A lame man in a rumpled suit who climbed
A slight incline of graves blurring into
The passing marble of other graves to visit
The vacant home of whatever is not left
Of Shelley & Trelawney. That walk uphill must
Be hard if you can't walk. At the top, the man
Wheezed for breath; sweat beaded his face,
And his wife wore a look of concern so
Habitual it seemed more like the way
Our bodies, someday, will have to wear stone.
Later that night, the three of us strolled,
Our arms around each other, through the Via
Del Corso & toward the Piazza di Espagna
As each street grew quieter until
Finally we heard nothing at the end
Except the occasional scrape of our own steps,
And so said good-bye. Among such friends,
Who never allowed anything, still alive,
To die, I'd almost forgotten that what
Most people leave behind them disappears.
Three days later, staying alone in a cheap
Hotel in Naples, I noticed a child's smeared
Fingerprint on a bannister. It
Had been indifferently preserved beneath
A patina of varnish applied, I guessed, after
The last war. It seemed I could almost hear
His shout, years later, on that street. But this
Is speculation, & no doubt the simplest fact
Could shame me. Perhaps the child was from
Calabria, & went back to it with
A mother who failed to find work, & perhaps
The child died there, twenty years ago,
Of malaria. It was so common then--
The children crying to the doctors for quinine.
And to the tourists, who looked like doctors, for quinine.
It was so common you did not expect an aria,
And not much on a gravestone, either--although
His name is on it, & weathered stone still wears
His name--not the way a girl might wear
The too large, faded blue workshirt of
A lover as she walks thoughtfully through
The Via Fratelli to buy bread, shrimp,
And wine for the evening meal with candles &
The laughter of her friends, & later the sweet
Enkindling of desire; but something else, something
Cut simply in stone by hand & meant to last
Because of the way a name, any name,
Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.

Larry Levis

In the Studio

And down by the brimming river... —W.H. Auden

A friend of mine once observed—his source, I believe, was in Marx—that the world in which seems most true to us is the one we experience in the first five years of our lives. We were driving down San Pablo Avenue into Oakland at the time—the year was 1976—and given intensely palpable layers of the city on every side, my first inclination was to exclaim, "But just look at the present all around us!" Nevertheless, his point is one I've continued to think about, and I still find it a good way to pose the question of time (past and present) in painting. Not just the point about childhood, but also the one about a world which seems true.

The paintings I make have various sources: lost songs, city shadows, family stories, the water's edge. These stories—or moments, if you will—are important to me as points of departure. But more crucial still are atmosphere, the cast of the light, a lowering sky, or tones of warm and cool. For the meanings here—like the pictures themselves—emerge in the act of painting, hidden in the movement of the brush.

90th and Park

Arrival on Sunday evening. Our driver, from somewhere in Africa, a warm face, inward-seeming. “Triborough Bridge or Midtown?” We select the latter (for the Triborough there’s a toll). Across Queens Boulevard, Rego Park, massive girder viaducts as we approach the river from the other side. Finally, last span, and down into the familiar numbered streets of Manhattan, crosstown block of apartments, dailiness of people’s lives right to the rivers edge—you enter in…

1111 Park, at 90th, Ann L.’s apartment, on the tenth floor. She’s still in Maine for the last of the holiday, quiet evening. Two doorman stand as we enter, offer to help with the luggage. One hands me an envelope, folded in half the long way, key inside, attached to a photo of Ann’s grandson, wearing a yarmulkah.

Apartment at night, an entire life, and past. Paintings by lamplight, some Ann’s own, a Milton Avery kind of feel. A horizontal run along the walls, nicely irregular, one to the next, but all of them chosen with one sensibility. Folk art from Ann’s travels, tucked in here and there. A wooden frog from India? Flat pieces, off-beat shapes, connected by small metal pins. Strings for movement—a puppet, or children’s toy.

View from all the windows, buildings by night—a view of old New York, shape of water tower on black girders just in front of the window—Antonioni, but without the anomie. A joining in, vast open-armed city, anonymous and alive.

Apartment lights, warm and discreet, each all different distances. Window shades, lights behind, balconies etched against glowing black sky. Pencil-thin high-rise off towards the river, dots of light on various floors. Nearer—bank of windows on Lexington, something commercial, but old.

East River, Evening

East River, late afternoon, Labor Day 2007. Swirls and churning, gray-green beast pouring down the chanel towards Roosevelt Island. Hot afternoon, city folk gathered along the promenade, strolling, an old rottweiler on his master’s leash, a shepherd, a retriever… People sitting on the dark green benches, reading, books of all kinds—a city of readers, where the words matter, or so it feels, fragility of the printed page, or perhaps just the intimacy of figure with a book set against the expanse of the river.

The air goes from warmer to cooler with each slight breeze—you wonder where the wind comes from here, not constant, off the bay as at home.

John Finley Park, at 90th Street, Gracie Manshion, the mayor’s abode. Hizzoner, hidden away behind the trees. Sloping up and above, the East River Drive with muffled roar of cars carved out below.

Languages of all kinds—people calling their children in phrases you’ve never heard. Young guy with elaborate SLR squatting to frame his lithe Southeast Asian companinion. She sits, graceful and a touch self-conscious, in front of the ancient curved iron railing running along the water’s edge.

Looking downtown, a broad view of the city, antique steel bracelet of the Queensborough Bridge, silver filigree, 19th century arch. One section covered with a padded blanket, as if for the evening. Tall buildings, always, topped by energetic cranes. Feeling of age and potential.