I hardly ever write something as an occasional poem but in thinking about David's collages this came out somewhat naturally. We were going to use it for an essay to accompany the collage show at Turtle Point Press but then I wrote the prose piece which we used instead.
Three Drawings
1
now, If you drew a Violin on the grass
and then a Magnolia in a framing tree
and if a house were drawn burning behind
and a bluejay chattering in the further tree
they would be drawn together, flat, by a line which seemed
more and more intent with drawing them
together like the original mystery they emerged
the negative and positive,
balance and interplay
of texture forming a surface.
2
When Monsieur S. drew them,
he borrowed a violin from that 19th c. painting
in the magazine and then that fire in the photo
he found on the Pont des Artistes and remembering
the bluejay from that further heap. He would
grid them and Yes, preserve that specific character that
someone, somewhere-- had drawn them once, they would
weave a reality in some way more life-like, maybe
as in our world of proliferating and actual overlay--
3
Now, when the boy King drew, he knew the actual violin in mind
but then thought this other idea of one, also possible
and then forgot the other-- lost original?
He searched for a Magnolia but there was none
and so used a Tulip. This was part of the house
burning but because that was the title of the poem
he only needed to add the bluejay
to let you know he wished it all could have been different.
His genius was to piece these things together
in a making of his own
as he was so very madly in love with the earth
he was close to and a part of
that whole, this earth--and this world, was seen in
reality, plural.
An Orange Hand, Here.
There was a big round Charlie Rose like table downstairs, it was the Anne Plumb Gallery in Soho. You could have called it a salon but we didn't, it was just what was happening.
I met David there probably discussing Frank O'Hara with Rene Ricard, pausing to add a remark about John Hedujk, then weaving together an idea from Goethe, there was a sense of permission. He already knew all the best poets and painters and was writing about them. He stuck everything in and continued to create his multi leveled pluralistic universe. It was a poem in progress.
David read his poetry often and I never missed it. I was far from being a connoisseur of poetry at the time but his musical voice and anecdotal goings on kept my interest.
I can remember, falling some where over Texas with his father, worrying but "safe in Texas," "safe as Texas." Different lines would stick, Blue jays and a "poor sparrow under an old car" a red bird flew. One easily loved the snow piling up in his poems.
Around the time of his, Evening Land, poem and The Seasons, did I start to catch on to the depth of associations required to approach. There was the fragile Earth behind, there were the ruins of art, a metal mouth, and a breast from somewhere before. A newspaper was blowing through, he could see, then couldn't see. Through the detritus, the constant qualifications but there was a ventriloquist's hope, a refusal to say no.
Here come the collages! I felt they were a side tributary to his poetry, running furiously for any time David wasn't writing-- they nervously ran and ran. Anyone that met David probably on the street between galleries, has a few collages hanging somewhere.
I scolded David for being so glib that, Hey, they were good but he cheapened them-- they came and came. One after the other. I grabbed for that one, No! David wanted to keep that one-- I took another. They evolved and I recognized a repeated imagery. This used over that and over, another repeated-- and then substituted.
Now, I think of the Whitman like tally, the scoring of each thing touched-- made real. The covering hands or birds like a Saint's touch conferring reality, here, here, and some still unrelated order into the scheme of things.
I asked John Ashbery about this complex once and he replied to me, I think, sarcastically, "Oh the poetry and painting thing." The oblique relations between the two arts, poets and painters. In our time seems just fine. They add enough.
David came to my studio once and wrote on xeroxes of paintings I had on my table. "The old sunflower almost blocks the sun" he wrote over a fragment of a sunflower painting. More than just oblique.
We had shared belief though knowing the difficulty or impossibility of. I think It seems to come down to just caring that much about something, a poem or painting to lend the added thought, to add ones own cherished autonomy to anothers, maybe a kind of poetic kiss.
Beside my desk is one of David's collages, a xeroxed figure of Cezanne's bather, a seahorse stamped onto this icon, adding a stuck on mystery-- it flattens to a "orange colored hand," reverberating, image to word, back.
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