Erasures
I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there.
It’s the invisible enemy.
— Richard Diebenkorn
He made this image
(carved it and smoothed it over)
expressing it by marks
in his mind; wordly and unseen
as quickly written over, stretched into full words
and the marks only at first suggested
in his ear she’d whispered — “bird”
(but he wasn’t listening, did not hear)
and he flapped his wetted wings
The painted image is just that,
the thing painted, not some standing in.
An adequate description
would have to trace infinitesimal specifics
of length, width, and thickness,
pick a shade of color from the chart,
note granularity and sheen,
locate it with calipers on the canvas
alongside similar patterns not the same,
and on and on the never finished, never ending
depictions,
and then to have just that repeated
because it’s nothing else.
When the painted image told a story
we could capture that
in words and sentences because
well, narrative is narrative;
but when the painted thing’s unrecognizable
what we call a splotch or blob,
oh, it’s tempting to define it
by his exertions painting it.
Charles Tarlton is retired from university teaching and has been writing tanka prose (and poetry more generally) full time since 2006. His wife, Ann Knickerbocker, (http://artistinanaframe.blogspot.com) is an abstract painter and they and work in Northampton, Mass.