of snow on top
of cars. In front of houses, each lawn
is as clean as paper, except where the first cat
or raccoon has walked across, each track
like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.
LOOKING AT THE ROMANS
in the museum, the heavy marble busts
on their white plinths, I recognize one likeness
as my uncle, the retired accountant
whose mind, like a conquered country, is turning
into desert, into the dust of forgotten things.
The white head of an old man, big as a god,
its short curled hair still rich
as matted grass, is my grandmother,
a Roman on her deathbed, surrounded
by a citizenry of keening, her breaths rising out
of the dark of a well, the orange medicine bottles
massed like an emergency on the table.
The delicate face of the serious young man
is another uncle, the one who lost
his friends when a plane hit their aircraft carrier,
the one who dropped pomegranate fires
on the scattering villagers, on the small
brown people who looked like him.
One bust is of a noblewoman, the pleats
of her toga articulated into silky marble folds,
her hair carved into singular strands:
she is the aunt who sends all her money home,
to lazy sons and dying neighbors.
Another marble woman is my other aunt,
the one who grows guavas and persimmons,
the one who dries salted fish on her garage roof,
as though she were still mourning
the provinces. Here is the cousin who is a priest.
Here is the cousin who sells drugs.
Here is the other grandmother, her heart still
skilled at keeping time. Here is my mother
in the clear pale face of a Roman’s wife,
a figure moving softly, among flowers and slaves.
BLACK CANVAS
The painter believes he can see better
by not seeing at all, so in the dark of his studio
he paints the dark. The canvases look like
oil slicks or nights without stars. In faintly brushed
arcs, white appears on the rough black,
as though to show where the light continues
to stay in the room: a glint on a ficus-leaf ’s edge,
a smudge on a mirror. Art in its intention
wants to be in the condition of poetry,
but most art is in the condition of prose.
This is not a slander to prose. Prose is what happens
when we watched a backyard rat die
during a hot Los Angeles afternoon, while
inside, a party ignited for an uncle turning
seventy-five. The rat had scurried across the yard,
stopped midway, and didn’t move again
except to drag towards a brick planter,
where it finally stopped, its face to the brick side,
its back pumping irregularly. At first
the children toyed with it, until the dark import
became clear: dying was the afternoon
lesson. There were two tables of food, three
birthday cakes, a whole suckling pig, an apple shiny
in its mouth, its legs like a racehorse
on the run, all feet off the ground.
When my friend and I saw the black paintings
in the gallery, he said that a trip
to Home Depot and he could make what
was in front of us. The point made me realize that
what’s visible isn’t always superior
to what can’t be seen, like ideas proven only
by poor means, as though the invisible
were a ventriloquist saying something important
with his mouth shut. The dying of the rat required
the rat to be there, its own illustration.
The dying of the uncle required that he be
at his birthday party, though certain cells, like ravens
in a winter landscape, winged through
his body, a slander to the man blowing out
seventy-five candles on three birthday cakes.
Because one condition of art is that it tries too hard,
in his studio the painter mixes twigs and sand
into the tub of black paint, a substance
active as tar, spread on the canvas like a road.
For the painter, there are stones, objects turned
now to stone, all kinds of ruin to plant
into the canvas. The things that don’t need any more
light.
