15 April 2012

15 April

A person was paid to plant these pinks
not hoping but knowing how it happens
every year. Again. And again, so much
more remains buried and the dog snuffles madly and
whiffs, rooting. These first post-equinox weeks
I come to remind you
or to make you forget
there is another way
its path is petal-near
and it will cost you everything, or maybe nothing.

01 April 2012

Back at it: April's fool


After Seeing Gerhard Richter Painting

Paintings are mortal enemies, says Richter
quoting Adorno, and poems too will kill you
if they roam unsupervised, untethered,
flying off along yon ecliptic with all they know,
know about you. Truth! Gad!

Maybe
it’s better to stop all this you mutter once
in a while, April nights when the thought squeezes
like a rat through a sliver in the baseboards

in the house built of words, always only words
so circumscribed, bound to 24 marks and
one antipodal Hippocratic oath: first, do harm –
that’s how you know it’s a word, a real word.

Another thing Richter says at movie’s end,
a line the director knew to save for last,
to remind us why we’d paid and offer
permission (the world loves to
hate its artists): It’s fun.