Look Here Look Away Look Again 9780773557659

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“Look Here Look Away Look Again is a marvel. Not halfway through the opening poem, I became conscious of a change: I could feel myself – ­almost see myself – thinking. I might have become lost in the sensation if not for the power of Carson’s pauses, the repeated and revelatory blinking of his (and my) mind’s eye. Here was the abstract made immediate, the synaptic insistence of body, brain and heart.” Alissa York, author of The Naturalist “What a perceiving and perceptive exploration Carson’s new book is. In Look Here Look Away Look Again, the ‘how of / how you gather your / thoughts’ is the beginning of time at the threshold of an event – especially an art event, and particularly painting – and as the ‘mind / spreads       across / the pond       in clusters’ each word becomes a brush stroke giving us a chance to explore a whole new way of reading. Carson’s investigative, propositional imagination plays on the deviations and paradoxes of representation as it moves towards and away from what we often think of as the real or the hallucinated, and we’re left with the fine shapes of words – seeing ‘things for       the first time /       every time /     we look again.’ This is ‘light       out of / thin air.’” Brian Henderson, author of Nerve Language, [OR], and Unidentified Poetic Object “The poems of Look Here Look Away Look Again emerge from the desire to see, as painters do, the lines that connect feeling and reason to the universal. Carson’s language is spatial, yet pinned to key images around which abstracted nature flows. I felt, when reading, as if I were eavesdropping on an ecstatic dialogue with eroticism and its chemical and ­alchemical relationships or, as the poems also indicate, tracking the flight of a bird along neural pathways as it migrates towards an ­innermost truth.”  Marilyn Bowering, author of Soul Mouth

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t h e h ugh m ac len n an po etry s eries Editors: Allan Hepburn and Carolyn Smart Waterglass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body to Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.P. Zitner The Thin Smoke of the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees Brian Bartlett Before We Had Words S.P. Zitner Bamboo Church Ricardo Sternberg Franklin’s Passage David Solway The Ishtar Gate Diana Brebner Hurt Thyself Andrew Steinmetz The Silver Palace Restaurant Mark Abley Wet Apples, White Blood Naomi Guttman Palilalia Jeffery Donaldson Mosaic Orpheus Peter Dale Scott Cast from Bells Suzanne Hancock Blindfold John Mikhail Asfour Particles Michael Penny A Lovely Gutting Robin Durnford The Little Yellow House Heather Simeney MacLeod Wavelengths of Your Song Eleonore Schönmaier But for Now Gordon Johnston Some Dance Ricardo Sternberg Outside, Inside Michael Penny

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The Winter Count Dilys Leman Tablature Bruce Whiteman Trio Sarah Tolmie hook nancy viva davis halifax Where We Live John Reibetanz The Unlit Path Behind the House Margo Wheaton Small Fires Kelly Norah Drukker Knots Edward Carson The Rules of the Kingdom Julie Paul Dust Blown Side of the Journey Eleonore Schönmaier slow war Benjamin Hertwig The Art of Dying Sarah Tolmie Short Histories of Light Aidan Chafe On High Neil Surkan Translating Air Kath MacLean The Night Chorus Harold Hoefle Look Here Look Away Look Again Edward Carson

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Look Here Look Away Look Again Edward Carson

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  Edward Carson 2019 ISBN 978-0-7735-5626-3 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5765-9 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-7735-5766-6 (eP UB) Legal deposit second quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Look here, look away, look again / Edward Carson. Names: Carson, Edward, 1948– author. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series. Description: Series statement: The Hugh MacLennan poetry series | Poems. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190046600 | Canadiana (eb ook) 20190046643 | I S BN 9780773556263 (softcover) | ISBN 9780773557659 (eP DF ) | I S BN 9780773557666 (eP U B ) Classification: L CC P S 8555.A7724 L66 2019 | DDC C811/.54— dc23 This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 9.5/13 New Baskerville.

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For Joyce

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If you hear with your eye, you are intimate at last. Wu-men kuan

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Contents

PA T T ER N R E C OGNI T I ON  1 Some Assembly Required  3

A G A PA N THUS T R I P T Y C H  9 Look Here  11 Look Away  16 Look Again  19

C O N ST EL L A T I ONS  2 3 Sunrise 25 The Escape Ladder  26 People at Night Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails 27 Women on the Beach  28 Woman with Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars  29 Morning Star  30 Wounded Figure  31 Woman and Birds  32 Woman in the Night  33 Acrobatic Dancers  34 The Nightingale’s Song at Midnight and Morning Rain  35 On the 13th the Ladder Brushed the Firmament  36 Nocturne 37 The Poetess  38 Awakening in the Early Morning  39

xi

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Toward the Rainbow  40 Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird  41 Women at the Edge of the Lake Made Iridescent by the Passage of a Swan  42 The Migratory Bird  43 Ciphers and Constellations in Love with a Woman  44 The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers 45 The Pink Dusk Caresses the Sex of Women and Birds  46 The Passage of the Divine Bird  47

C O N FLU ENC E   49 Triptych with Swallows and Blossoming Lilies Survives a Volcano 1650–1550 BC  51 541 Million Years Ago the Cambrian Explosion Spawns a Eukaryotic Cell  52 A Bird’s Eye View (in Proportion) of Vitruvian Man Laid Flat on His Back   53 Flying Away in Fear a Startled Flock of Birds Emerges From a Dark Wood   54 The Salvator Mundi’s Ghost Emerges as Neural Networks Rework the Mind  55 The Constellations of Abstract Art Consolidate as History in a Hurry  56 From the Centre the Artist Views the Figure of the Heavenly Bodies   57 Trajectory of an Escape Ladder in a Night Flight to the Pleiades 58 A Girl and Pearl and a Turban Capture the Viewer’s Attention 59 A Hue and Cry in a Drove of Birds Has a Habit of Tumbling Out of Us  60

xii

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Giacometti’s Fascination with the Gaze in Portraits that Take the Place of the Person  61 An Art of Resemblance as Exact Resemblance is No Ordinary Lie  62 Escher Landscape with Flight of Stairs Leading Every Which Way 63 We Are Who We Are When We Are Is How We Will Eventually Appear   64 Woman 1 Emerges with Its Correct Allotment of Four Anatomical Parts  65 The STRING of Information Plots the Genome of Escape and Return  66 “You Look Out at the World with One Eye and into Yourself with the Other”  67 When Exuberance of the Whole is at Odds with the Sum of Its Parts  68 What Demoiselles Said to the Viewer upon Seeing the Painting Completed 69 Convergence of the Unobserved in a SPlicing-based ANalysis of vaRiants  70 Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic is Time Repeating Itself  71 Attacking the Canvas Seemed Like One of the Better Ideas at the Time  72 How in Unguarded Moments We See When We Look at a Painting 73 Coda 75 Thanks & Notes  77

xiii

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Pattern Recognition I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to e­ xpress it in words. Albert Einstein Thinking takes place in language, and it’s hard to say whether the language is creating the thinking or the thinking is creating the language. Kay Ryan

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S o m e As s e m b ly R e q u i r e d

It is

in thinking how a thought begins

and what it might turn into over time that to mind

what soon comes is a bird,

a networking in

of neurons airborne

evening moonlit sky. As the light turns

so too the thought, a latticing of white and dark. Some tilting Some and Others yet more



things arrive at everything. things form grow than

borrow another. to be they are.

This occupies the mind easy as a flying bird,

3

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startled by escapes Its

a nearby sound, into deeper

distant woods. flight is motion in motion, filling the sky with of incongruity.

Any thought is a diversion,

signs

of its meaning a declaration

at work on resisting itself. This paradox multiplies inside

the mind, flight

dissolving offering no

into end

the quiet

light, to beauty.

And beauty is ready, unruly or compliant, forsaking something in a calmer place as though

its clarity will sustain

all light

dispersing the mind.

inside

4

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It sees

desire where

at the horizon headway

of moon swoops the swirling

as are

low sky.

across

Corrections are plotted flight lines of pleasure.

In time, contradictions

intensify,

detailing darker lines of embroidery. Every calculation is delicate, every measure fine-tuned. A beauty uncommon as this

when

is best loved the measure joins

familiar,

what is the way

of it also

the sense

of what is contrary, though also like-minded,

remains

lingers hidden,

in plain There is sense

close by, yet continues sight. in all

this.

5

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The physical world connects with intention,

beauty is of cause Its weather away

whereas a climate and effect. slips by or snakes

from itself where next

Beauty for all weightless nest So it is

as if knowing to go.

comes dressed occasions, floats inside of its

the deep meaning.

in thinking a thought begins.

how

Distances disconnect. Proximity anticipates appearance. The mind consents to this confusion, will form again what makes each image keenly felt. The cold surface of the visible world in this way.

organizes

6

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Things coalesce much as a bird pressed against the sky becomes

itself and something it is not.

7

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Agapanthus Triptych With the [Claude Monet] Water Lily panels … All the normal ­markers, like the edge of the water or the sky or the distant trees, have disappeared, and you’re just right in the face of those water ­lilies and the surface of the water with the clouds reflected from above you become lost in this expanse of water and of light. Ann Temkin, MoMA

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look here

(i) Light stipples the air. A blue sky is floating. Lacking limit or horizon, yet containing both, what we know of as representation loves agreement, seeks likeness of other. Into this measure, water submerges us. The mind spreads across the pond in clusters of lilies mushrooming recalling a history and lingering resilience. As to its conversion in the mind, all currents to the observer, even closer

is nearly as lilies,

are slow to calm.

Thinking it so the same but not quite, reconciling 11

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an overflow of feeling and thought, carefully advance from accretion to imitation.

12

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(ii) In this immersion and effect, water yields all direction, emptying itself, while a bird

making

a sound not unlike escaping to, occupying the sky.

Where water,

there is there should be

flow, and

where

the flow is

the light maintains a momentum sustaining itself. Water arrives at the edge of light, but never is the light itself, much as a likeness of lilies becomes the image of the thing and not the thing itself. Representation disrupts, interrupts what water is, all light

13

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distracting how very close we come to becoming something like the other.

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(iii) Not

unlike the familiar taking leave of itself, all progress in the light, like lilies taking shape, is unexpected. Where there is light, there should be shadow, or where shadow is there should be light. As in flow, each image floods

itself, the surface running deeper where the pull of light, not unlike

our breath, a sound, leads us to the water’s edge.

makes closer

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look away

(i) Water

arrives in motion. Above and below, a buoyant garden coalesces, multiplying lilies

from airy unbroken clouds and light out of thin air. Water’s disruption is its pleasure, repeating what has appeared, yet overcoming the shape of its being. When thought of in this way, all

painting is subversive. If representation transforms what is thought and observed, the fallacy

of art perceived as water

might be without

maintaining

end

emptying itself

but

embracing

all that it holds.

16

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(ii) Light too is leaning away from where the slowmoving currents wait to leave Water

the unfinished sky. is much loved, but the light

yearns

to be remembered, to be seen differently. So it is in this light that all thought embraces more than what memory maintains within it. It is

expected the lilies will hold their beauty against the light withdrawing from itself.

17

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(iii) Within this garden, all motion lingers. Closer to pause than motionless, its purpose is more like waiting, and far less still than immobility. Its

story

raw

is the delay of memory, appetite of need and index

of uncertainty. It brings into question the other side of light. As memory is capricious, the future is an elegant denial of time retreating from

the before

and after

fever of recollection dividing

the mind.

18

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look again

(i) Time is light unravelling, solving itself. Weather wears away, coating leaves with bright benediction. Complications arise, tumbling through the light. Our memories, too transient for belief, reluctantly look away. Each narrative awakes, recounting a promise of release. It’s here where lilies, attracting a sky

made of water, at the surface. They lie down with the light, hover

19

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their

image making an argument in favour of making,

an ongoing

representation of order,

the kinship of beauty

and fidelity.

20

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(ii) Following this light across the pond, water arrives at the farthest edge of itself, almost invisible,

a clean

line floating

at the boundaries of water and reflection. Elastic, fluid

the evidence

of infinity emerges at its brink, opening a thought that what comes this far can appear to be this close without actually being so, whereas water and light stretch to suit the passage of time emptying, then vanishing inside itself.

21

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(iii) Water and light will nourish what they can before persuading us otherwise, will

question more than we have the means or will to recognize. There is much to resolve. Opposing thoughts, once aroused, migrate into understanding, coincides. What lies in wait in a season

yet all pools

of adaptation,

the reason and result of bud and bloom. What departs will meet time’s wintering,

an open light we soon flow into, intersecting what persists.

22

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Constellations In 1939 the Catalan painter Joan Miró (1893–1983) left Paris for Varengeville-sur-Mer in Normandy, and it was here an important new body of work was formed – a series of twenty-three ­gouaches, which became known as the Constellations. Ina Cole, Art Times, May/June 2011

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S u n ri s e

no dark hallucination this sunrise frolic its circle on circle is unsettled pleasure caressing points of neural conversion where observer and observed coalesce concurrently in a system of constant accretion yet this morning is buoyant the sun’s curve holding back reason for a while for the time it takes for us to reflect on the heart of it where there will be discrete contours of truth or beauty also calm absolution unguarded vulnerable moments of slow self-forgetting in dissolving memory landscapes crying out to a bird only slightly startled flying away

25

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The E s c ap e L a d d e r

we are the body connected for searching in unconnected currents where all escape from dislocation requires more successive iterations of overflow in annular time or maybe trajectories of suffering and sadness careening in tandem making

known every

intimacy ending in feelings of uncertainty as one thing comes as a reaction to some other thing both great and small with intertwined stillness and zigzag freedoms floating inside a helical firmament snaking down pathways cascading into crimson synapses where the dark lights of reason and feeling climb toward thought-shapes rising in the mind

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P e o p le at N i g h t G u i d e d b y the P ho s p h o r e s c e n t T r ac k s o f S nails please forget everything you think or know about the role of imitation and appearance in a painting shaping the darkness of sight the way night shadows are organized around half-moon constellations overlapping articulated lines looking more like DNA or even ladders abstracted and amplified into thorny phenotypes from simpler thingamajigs and phosphorescent tracks reflecting the diversity of what signifies glimmering snails or leads us somewhere inside the clear light of human biology to a divided sky rapidly filling with something lost something adrift something so near to vanishing its length and breadth are the last we will ever see of it

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Wo m e n o n t h e B e ac h

narrative is no simple tale where no Venus exists but two concupiscent women recount discrete stories of confident bodies caressing anticipation as well as a baring of breasts and the curvatures of persistent expectations yet their wandering eyes are looking away from a disapproving audience of the viewer and the viewed only to stare in discomfort at what appears to be a bird or could it be another woman flying upward diagonally into the face of a half-hidden sun unsure whether its light is a light of self-forgetting or a chemistry of relationships between likeminded variables escaping the fear of falling

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Wo m an w i t h B l o n d A r m p i t Combing He r Ha i r b y t h e L i g h t o f the Stars with no apparent sign of gravity’s pull or invitation to equilibrium some assembly might be required as empty spaces empty out to empty horizons showing adaptation to absence can be workable in which a crescent moon solace of stars and tempest of shapes in a nest

of whizzing curvilinear lines connect

practical thoughts and experiences disguised as idealized sources of latent content and yet they willfully remain heavenly bodies above a woman brushing night light into her hair clearly illustrating there is no known method of disentangling why form is never something as abstract as it is always a sign of something

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M o rn i n g S ta r

don’t quote me on this but the sun won’t rise for three hours or so so this might not be a story about morning at all nor is it really a star but a planet at the tail end of night becoming visible as a portent of something real though what that is is any one’s guess but what is rising from where the horizon suddenly falls away amid curls of gaseous clouds are primordial biomorphs and hybrid creatures all in dazzling amphibian forms fashioned with insect patience who now must take control of the story and show that nothing is more important than the truth of what goes into what is behind what you see

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Wo u n d e d F i g u r e

at its length and breadth the shape of it deeper sharper in a farrago of lines alive within a neural network of pain caressing the mind the mind also at work thinking how a wound so intimate can be difficult to heal over time how thinking of something can alter it merely by thinking again much as memory

continuously revises reorganizes

reshapes what it recalls in response to new experiences of a feeling a

looking more like

wound embraced by pain as a sure sign

all constellations are indeed this complex but not without the human beauty of flaws the blurring of time or pleasures of disruption

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Wo m an an d B i r d s

while hungry in love the days will fly by with all that is love or even love of all that is feared while the language of art pending further explanation of this squall of flocking birds is more a likeness of one and abstraction of many overlooking a lady’s whorled pubes or could they be cloudburst curls of musical staves spilling over her wishbone legs and hips lifted high in heated anticipation that empties the body of all resolve her indulgent mouth opened wide in advancing her yearning that these percussive moments are swollen with markers forever fast and slow in signing and sighing

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Wo m an i n t h e N i g h t

the question might arise whether she is in the night or of its gallimaufry as part of some network having recently made herself modestly available to schmooze from evening to morning’s star but that would be asking too much expecting far more than squiggles of hair breasts lips eyes or tongue might convey for the story is more than viewing from a viewpoint but something in constant emotion that’s also restrained or something still but stirring in the hunt for narratives filled by a light of the other looking for a way ahead and finding in the dark no escape from turning into what is inescapable

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Acro bati c D a n c e r s

in this kind of dance everything connects just in time so the secret of being there when and where the other arrives is quite crucial to being wholly present in the exact moment when someone who is continuously looking for someone else is also looking for them they must have begun to wonder if there is reason to believe things can work out the way one thing relies on becoming another the way the sense of what looks like a bricolage is really an illusion giving the appearance of many things when in fact it’s a single- minded effort where every shape is more than it is and more than it’s not

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The N i g h t i n g a l e ’ s S o n g at M i d n i g h t a n d M o r n i n g R ain below he explores by day seduces by night while flying above she decodes his several hundred serpentine choral song arrangements riffs and sequences that buzz trill or whistle about territory directions or sex and though physics never quite enters the conversation it occupies

the

entire

frame bridging a space

time continuum between midnight and morning where moon and stars in the lower quadrants turn things upside down as a wider theory of circles some filled or half-empty rain down making sure any divisions among past present and future remain stubbornly persistent illusions in a mind trying to decipher all things at once

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O n the 1 3 t h t h e L a d d e r B r u s hed t h e  F i r m a m e n t a recurring audience of circles and known repertoire of lines fine-tune these sparkling bits and bobs rising up falling sauntering or singing through the mix with some repetition so we are tempted to look here to see what else is there then look away to a blue-eyed star escaping the moon’s allure but when we look again what passes for a ladder’s brush with the firmament this time around is no mean free path or music of the spheres or paradoxical infinite regress but is a rhetoric of exuberant spaces gravity and desire that knows each pleasing elaboration surprises at fabricating ideas orbiting a radiant disorder

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N o ctu r n e

no likeness of a piano visible here though at night there’s no mistaking the complexity of sight or sound meandering back and forth as a right hand plays melody the left lets loose long fluid rhythms broken chords and ostinati that singly and together are plain and simple jazz while listeners are all ears as to how a blind player feels these nightly vibrations where bustle of counterpoint turns to flourish squeezing and pulling at the air transmitting waves to neural impulses stirring the mind of each viewer to see residing in the familiar look and sound of disarray are a trembling of clarity and hubbub of order

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The P o e t e s s

trafficking in the intangible and disappeared she writes from the off-hours of an open desk landscaping space and time or tuning sapphic moons cautiously sniffing out lines more agile than history livelier

than desire

her thoughts hoarding or revitalizing sibylline data mountains of sense from the far distant and near vertical and horizontal where this paradox of writer and reader networking all things across a composite divide finds within the median of thought a portrait of parallels determined always to look like something it is to become more than it can be to look here look again where it is and then isn’t

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Awake n i n g i n t h e E a r ly M orning

where in the world if not in the mind and if when breaking loose of itself out of the blue how should the mind look at the day head-on then steal away quickly not unlike a bird in morning air nesting then fearfully escaping a sudden sound a wary awakening retreat from the mindless chatter or the clatter wallop bang and much ado of the day while the mind withdraws in kind in elastic looping figures as well as brouhahas of feathery frills and gewgaws festooned with stars or streamers for a day beginning is not without disruption in a world we see that never is what it was after staring into it as long as we can bear

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Toward t h e R a i n b ow

why oh why on the way to somewhere over the way up high or even higher still looking at rainfall emptying dissolving bringing forward a spectrum of reflections swerving with orderly refractions where accumulations of light letting loose a radiance are self-organized like some algorithmic domain well beyond comprehension but also a covenant against sorrows so deep that in the earth’s slow curve skies that are full of wonder can fall and seas rise up our eyes full of tears or unnatural creatures hard at work hollowing into the mind so we look away sometimes hoping for something like a beautiful music relentless as why oh why oh

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Wo m e n E n c i rc l e d b y t h e F l ight of a Bird periphery being always about the distance to an edge taking into account the circle’s direction speed acceleration in plane geometry fundamentals of a bird or so we are told it’s a bird flying in a certain path offering signs of solutions to problems like quantum gravity or the arrow of time or an orbiting of naked singularities that sooner rather than later are liberated from all recognizable forms into the solipsistic twirls slices flakes of a mind confining itself as well as the women it seduces into thinking what they see is a bird a perception blowing up an inviolable promise of truth in a celestial entanglement

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Wo m e n at t h e E d g e o f t h e L a ke Made I ri d e s ce n t b y t h e P a s s a g e o f a Swan iridescent adrenaline blushes of desire slowly form in cheeks of tongue-tied women startled near the edge of a lake by a passing swan a not-so-subtle tipoff of readiness and signal that something is about to happen something unusually rare but at the brink of pleasure where the brain in that moment is tweaking its blood flow to remain in balance with a sudden commotion of neurons the effect of which is no maiden blush bepaint or allure of submission but a fleeting loss of thought and passing self-forgetting reaching beyond the push-pull of the mind its elastic reason for being teeming under the weight of desire

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The M i g r ato ry B i r d

from A to B is a path straighter than most might imagine a line in motion as a length without breadth seen as a reference in time having a position direction and extension in space yet accelerating at a velocity along an horizon while the night has begun to descend from the east and starlight is flooding a sky where a bird’s eyes absorb the light sparking a molecular response and photochemical reply sensitive to the extent and direction of earth’s magnetic field in navigating from A to B an

orientation of thought in thinking how a

thought begins and then travels on to arrive at another place connected and like-minded

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Ci p he rs a n d C o n s t e l l at i o n s i n L ov e w i t h a W o m a n breaking things into more manageable bits the horizon full of 88 adoring constellations is no abstract love field upturned or turned around by sly encryptions of electronic data disentangling mysteries or relationships with algorithmic linear ghosts but look here at the mischief from binary murmurs in space amounting to sweet nothings and alphabetic rumours often seen in the company of and under the influence of a woman controlling a composite code of a key to a code for the darkest of dark matter dividing lovers the spaces between things difficult to see as hope and deceit grow weary in waiting

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The B e au t i f u l B i r d R e v e aling the  U nk n ow n to a P a i r o f Lovers this narrative might just be deceptive being neither feeling nor reason but is based on uncertain thoughts of beauty and truth that multiply inside the mind a cause and effect escalation not unlike that of a bird suddenly appearing airborne dispersing and reforming in the mind becoming a revelation familiar but unknown in agreement yet contrary to the eye of the beholder where the reason for beauty is a feeling of truth whereas this pair of lovers is looking everywhere for some unknown thing and do not see the reckless abandon and careful control of a passion let loose and beautifully contained

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The P i n k D u s k C a r e s s e s t h e Sex o f  W o m e n a n d B i r d s when touch became nuzzle became more the women all sensed the transformation was not to be ignored but the birds thought nothing of it feeling there are no differences to see yet what might look like simple replication of hash marks cubes asterisks circles lines is not simple or repetitious but the longer repetition is repeated much as a rose is a rose is a rose is merely a rose at the start and always so much more thereafter and so in the process something emerges over time the outlines of sky horizons moons or faces and feathers and vast empty spaces embracing the tender caressing of meaning and measure

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The P as s a g e o f t h e D i v i n e Bird

at this point in the story celestial might be something of a stretch more likely heavenly body or perhaps even closer an inconvenient complication in the mind between the flaws of beauty and distractions of belief but this migratory vision is a slow transit fast filling empty spaces mapping out neural firmaments all of it absorbed in the brain a data soup of osmosis disrupting penetrating deeply electric in form and content the contours of thoughts and feelings in the flexible self making way for constellations giving new shape to endlessly evolving narratives seen everywhere and pulling together differently every time we look again

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Confluence

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Tri p tyc h w i t h S wa l l ow s an d  B l o s s o m i n g L i l i e s S u rv i v e s a V o l c a n o 1650–1550 BC the swallows are males fighting and not male and female kissing a not unnatural error of perception in frescos of a spring inflorescence of lilies from root to bloom penetrating deeply into the walls yet portraying the feeling of gently swaying breezes or perhaps foretelling history has a way of looking far better than it was something lost then found to be more misapprehension than misappropriation

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541 M i l l i o n Y e a r s A g o t h e Cambrian E x p l o s i o n S paw n s a E u k a ryo tic Cell the invisible wants to say this isn’t here when in fact it is imperceptible as glass until we run up against its edge a canvas of collaboration of give and take it invites the eye to seek the other side pulling the mind through to a timeline of preferences where way leads on to way connecting a fateful encounter and milestone of something from nothing to a record of molecules in motion fashioning what is

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A Bi rd ’ s E y e V i e w ( i n P r o p ortion) of vitr uvian man L a i d F l at o n His Back as seen from above the beautiful body is bilaterally symmetrical the mind turning its length and angles into consciousness of calculus and a geometry of properties schooled in the fine linear points of parallel analogs and seductions of surface and yet its fiery membro virile is playfully centred in a square of a world and a heavenly circle arms reaching out and legs spread-eagled anticipating earthy and cosmic measures

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F lyi n g Away i n F e a r a S ta rt l ed F lock o f Bi rd s E m e r g e s F r o m a D a r k Wood the feeling that you feel a sense of  unease when something goes astray in the mind’s everyday thinking is the how of how you gather your  thoughts conscious and directed instinctive and unplanned  when what populates the mind most is an escape into a sky  the narrative idea of the one with the gathering of the many  slipping away in similarity and difference raising a sudden alarm  of something entirely new

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The salvator mundi ’ s G h ost Emerges as N e u r a l N e t wo r k s R e wo r k the Mind what comes to light surfaces  as a nest of hair in elaborate ringlets cascading  out from a cloudy sfumato of colours highlighting  a portrait not made by an amateur or follower but a pentimento  of cosmetic detail reworking a repentance of original lines resulting in one thing becoming another directing the viewer to a blurring of boundaries and a sense of something unearthly just out of sight

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The Co n s t e l l at i o n s o f A b s t ract Art Co n s o l idat e a s H i s to ry i n a Hurry the painful truth of the matter looks to be surfaces bridging separations reluctantly intangible though not unwillingly representational as part of an urgency of history stressing form in pure picture planes daring thought to be attracted to itself in a configuration of shapes showing ample opportunity for intimate observation that works at problems having no obvious solutions in sight

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F ro m t h e C e n t r e t h e A rt i s t Views the figure of the heavenly bodies where do we come from where are we going to what are we doing here the cosmographer asks from a worldly midpoint conveyed by this illustration of many-sided narratives and epicycles composite deferents and equants of systems and ratios in proportion predicting points of view where the wandering eye is in no hurry to identify a celestial order philosophy gods or the next 1000 years

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Traj e cto ry o f a n E s c a p e L a dder i n a N i g h t F l i g h t to t h e P l e iades everything in this sky is a path to  anger or uncertainty envy or malice connects with a  DNA of constellations in a celestial narrative conjuring  a whiff of pity and perhaps shame so look here at heavenly  sisters escaping into the stars with all that is one thing leading to another their flight warning of  an imagery too easily overlooked careening into the cruel  anxiety of loss

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A G i rl a n d P e a r l a n d a T urban Cap tu r e t h e V i e w e r ’ s A t t e ntion the art of the viewer observing moves forward an intrusion into the painting attracting  the attention of a girl whose face is halfway turning here  to the side collecting us into her eyes a captivating look from  which we can’t easily escape but the real interruption  is the turban a visual ultramarine of tension and calm  equidistant between the true influence of the known  and puzzle of the unexpected

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A Hu e an d C ry i n a D r ov e o f Birds Has a Hab i t o f T u m b l i n g O u t of Us in numbers they are cacophonous  a moving picture of clatter happening before our eyes more simultaneous than sequential and yet are heard and seen as innumerable and hence as measureless something countless  being counted on as endlessly chattering never to be looked upon  as empty while filling the palaver and rigmarole of this commotion rising up in a darkly beautiful undulating flock  of emergent dissonant flight

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G i aco m e t t i ’ s F a s c i n at i o n with the   G az e i n P o rt r a i t s t h at Take the  P l ac e o f t h e P e r s on again and again and again this obsession repeatedly beginning and never finished full of  accidents and what it’s like inhabiting a body defined  by nests of lines restlessly straying mutating into unapologetic  loops in search of connections to moments at rest and also in motion  yet no longer is a portrait of someone but now is someone  itself giving shape to fitful feelings of melancholy or isolation  the viewer a prisoner of its eyes

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An Art o f R e s e m b l a n c e a s E xact Re s e m bl a n c e i s N o O r d i n a ry Lie a lie’s force of attraction finds no easy canvas to hide in where paint is an imitation of another imitation pulling wool over eyes something seen sideways  or left unsaid maneuvering the nervous truth of its deception  to where the very thought of dupe or con is left wide open to  some other interpretation confirming observation is a give  and take floating then accelerating as a sure sign gravity  is off centre by a mile

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E s che r L a n d s c a p e w i t h F l i ght of S tai rs L e a d i n g E v e ry W h i c h Way streaming into binary delights the zero 0  is invisible while the one 1 zigzags through the paradoxes  of a boolean printed puzzle portraying illusions of space  between what is up or down but the brain can’t organize that way or  think what it thinks knowing what it knows as the mind’s eye ponders enigmas linking everything to where relativity is  not something decipherable so the real question is what is here  to see what is here to believe

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We Are W h o W e A r e W h e n W e Are I s How W e W i l l E v e n t ua l ly A ppear in that moment transfix anaesthetize  the eye goad bait the canvas while juggling advancing receding in scale and gesture a continuous stream  of sleight of hand colours creating a counterfeit appearance  and hours of attraction to persuasive marvels that resist simplicity resist time resist surface resist meaning because history arrives only once and reality is merely an objective not an end

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woman 1 E m e r g e s w i t h I t s Correct Al l o tm e n t o f F o u r A n ato mic al Parts at the very heart of figuration  the portrait is a fluid chain of ambiguities where even  an abstract form has to have a likeness the deceptive anatomical proportions in continual alteration recreate narratives overlaying storms of drama pain love  and anger in domains of space where the body at a glance  is never finished arms breasts eyes teeth a muscularity  thick with lucid incoherence

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The STRI N G o f I n f o r m at i o n Plots the G e n om e o f E s c a p e a n d R eturn the way an image snares us sometimes in thoughts we’ve never thought before  we’re perplexed to see that the full tilt slide and twirl in a biology of painterly twists and turns align with a molecular law of attraction where sequences of minor  differences will often turn out to be neither small nor without  moment giving no escape from seeing things for the first time  every time we look again

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“ Yo u L oo k O u t at t h e W o r l d with One E y e a n d i n to Y o u r self with the Other” in painting Modigliani sometimes  was ahead of the nudes sometimes the other way around  an elusive erotic art its clamour and energy in the mind  both rigorous and sentimental managing a balance of geometry  and come-on allure leading to streamlined almond eyes reclining figures flashing seduction a symmetry of chemistry  rising and falling in a world of mischief setting the necessary universe on fire

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Whe n E x ub e r a n c e o f t h e W h ole is at O d d s w i t h t h e S u m o f I t s Parts where landscape is wise the mind shuns variation and anomaly shaping thought out of observation  from hungry earth and tree building shade near ellipse of shore  knowing where proportion is composed except where hissing winds whipping self-contained pliant waters let loose the notion that  a collaboration of components on the whole is by itself an exhilaration  of limits an alignment that can easily evade detection bypassing what is undeniable

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What demoiselles S a i d to t he Viewer u p o n S e e i n g t h e P a i n t i n g Completed look and listen closely to the women in question their raucous torsos breasts in montage or slyly masking faces across the centuries while arms in disorderly angles are reaching to stroke a sweetness in baffling dark corners but in the right light the viewer’s predicament remains as eyes invite a waiting beauty foreseeing the caressing of history its huzzing and trilling murmur and burr

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Co n ve rg e n c e o f t h e U n o b s e rved in a S P l i ci n g - ba s e d A N a ly s i s o f vaRiants in darker chromosomes of pleasure all normal markers say to the eye this is where to meet to pause or to merge but at the edge there is always a shadow of what turns up next a deviation from a story arriving at sunrise flooding emptying the mind a dropping off away from trust and a sudden irrational fear of something we know will appear in observable representation an absence urging us to enter anytime

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M o the r w e l l ’ s E l e g y to t he Spanish Re p u b l i c i s T i m e R e p e at i n g Its elf can’t see for looking into the past past deliberate and accidental geometric repetitions a flock of 200+ canvases all passion no seduction migrating the eye’s picture planes evolving over years yet looking minutes old in rectangular panels and calligraphically thick flights of black ovals soaring in a series overwhelming the mind escaping from an emotionally charged continuous present hiding from history

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Attacki n g t h e C a n va s S e e m ed Like O n e o f th e B e t t e r I d e a s at the Time Pollock rearranges the weather of the self in domains of colours swallowing each other storming engulfing the canvas or the viewer with nothing to hold on to but the fluttery quiver shiver and shake of shapes raining down in cloudbursts or floating in space competing for attention in abstract strokes of anxiety flooding at the edges unravelling codes of sorrow provoking tempests of being constellations of want

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How i n U n g ua r d e d M o m e n t s We S e e Whe n W e L o o k at a P a i n ting in real life the eye is the present in a hurry continuously self-forgetting looking for a point of view the mind never wondering why there is always something rather than nothing to see never bored thinking it might not be the mind at all never suspecting when we look here look away look again we fall back afraid into the arms of memory haunted by the loneliness of seeing alone

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C o da

John Milton’s observation that “the mind is its own place” is very much at the heart of these poems, as is the view by Geoffrey Hinton, noted psychologist, computer scientist, and “godfather” of deep learning that “a vision system needs to use the same knowledge at all locations in the image.” The poet works hard at looking at and trying to resolve or unpack issues arising out of the confluence of the mind and the metaphorical design and patterned structures of ­language. Ultimately, for poet and reader, some assembly is required. A poem becomes a self-organizing model of the mind’s neural network, algorithmically and heuristically ­creating the paradoxes, fallacies, and insights, the planned and unintended thoughts and feelings. Much the same processes are at work in all art. Creator and observer are immersed in the problems of making and representation, beauty and order, truth and fabrication. What do we think when looking at a painting? What happens when we write about that experience? It’s more than ekphrasis, or as the poet Cole Swensen says, it “lies in the looking and in the viewer, not in the artwork itself.” Writing and reading, like memory, are part of a transforming, reorganizing process. Thought, co-creating with language, continuously ­revises and refashions in response to fresh circumstances. A poem shows that what you see is always more than what you see.

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Thanks & Notes

Special thanks are due to Brian Henderson, long-time friend and patient reader, for his wise and perceptive edits, and to Allan Hepburn, my editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, for his insights and reminders of what interrupts a poem. In 2016, I was not fortunate enough to be at the Royal Academy of Arts in London when for the first time in Britain all three parts of Claude Monet’s 42 ft long Agapanthus Triptych went on display. The three canvases are rarely seen together, belonging as they do to three separate museums. That said, interested readers can find a wonderful video and commentary by Ann Dumas, the curator of the exhibition, on YouTube (“Claude Monet’s Agapanthus Triptych,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5nPXFv517w). Joan Miró’s Constellations series was first exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in January 1945. All 23 of these remarkable gouaches were again brought together in 2017 at the Acquavella Galleries in New York. Joan Punyet Miró, the artist’s grandson, described Constellations as follows: “It is as if Miró was a nocturnal bird able to escape from the earth, leaving the sky, traveling across the sky, the stars, to the constellations, to capture them all with one hand, and draw back to earth them on a sheet of paper (“TV3 Televisió de Catalunya”). For all 23 gouaches together in one place, see Margit Rowell and Mildred Glimcher, Calder Miró Constellations (New York: Rizzoli, 2017).

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All 23 poem titles in the section entitled “Constellations” are from Miró’s 23 Constellations gouaches as presented in Margit Rowell and Mildred Glimcher, Calder Miró Constellations (New York: Rizzoli, 2017). In “Woman with Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars” the words in italics – form is never something as abstract as it is always a sign of something – are a quote from Joan Miró pushing against the notion of totally non-objective art in Abstract Surrealism, in “Joan Miró: Comment and Interview” with James Johnson Sweeney, Partisan Review 15, 2 (February 1948): 208–12. In “Women at the Edge of the Lake Made Iridescent by the Passage of a Swan” the words in italics – maiden blush bepaint – are a quote from Juliet’s monologue in act II, scene II, in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In “541 Million Years Ago the Cambrian Explosion Spawns a Eukaryotic Cell” the words in italics – way leads on to way – are from Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” In “A Bird’s Eye View (in Proportion) of Vitruvian Man Laid Flat on His Back” the words in italics – membro virile – are from Leonardo Da Vinci, “On the Proportions and on the Movements of the Human Figure,” The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (Volume 1), edited by Jean Paul Richter (New York: Dover, 1970). In “Woman 1 Emerges with Its Correct Allotment of Four Anatomical Parts” the words in italics – even an abstract form has to have a likeness – are a variation of a quote from Willem de Kooning in Thomas B. Hess, William de Kooning (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 47. 78

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In the coda, the quote from John Milton can be found in Paradise Lost, Book 1, line 233; Geoffrey Hinton in “Matrix Capsules with EM Routing,” 2018, https://openreview.net/ pdf?id=HJWLfGWRb; and Cole Swensen in “Interview with Cole Swensen,” Jubilat 10 (2005): 90.

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