Dean Kostos
PAINTED WITH A RAZOR BLADE
after Arshile Gorky
Not tulips, not hyacinths, not violets-
this dark-lapelled boy offers his mother
a bouquet of leaves
with bandaged hands.
To postpone death, he peers through a blur.
Smear is a language: birds warble
above blood-soaked fields.
Foliage knits over severed limbs.
As a man,
he paints his mother & boy-self
with a razor blade. Uses sandpaper
to scrape memory
from canvas.
His eyes dim as he counts
black petals on the dress
she died in-
her body's
bouquet of carrion.
NAMED A NAME LIKE THOUGHT
Thoth-scribe of gods, attorney to divine council-clicked the mouse & printed flesh. As he died, language sprouted. Sanskrit maw sang Vedas. Mycenaean jaw chanted Linear B, waited for Phoenician Aleph Bet to forge alphabets: Hebrew, Greek, Etruscan, Latin-a batter poured into the mold of Norman French, langue of Guillaume le Conquérant, leavening Chaucer's English. Frankincense exhaled from Sophia's dome, dominated: refugee scholars, philosophers, sophists-with beards of smoke-trudged to Florence, hauled parchments scrawled by hand, inked by Gutenberg's moveable type: incunabula. Florence to Paris to Warsaw ... Scripture sowed thought's soil. Boccaccio ate an ancient lexicon, its juice dripping into his pen. He fed himself to Avon's swan—silvered o'er with white. Now brain-pulses sail across screens, ghost-oceans of cyberspace. Mouse-click: Thoth pilots us to memory's theater: a council of icons beams halo vowels.
PAREIDOLIA
"Every photograph is a certificate of presence."—Roland Barthes Art isn't abstract but abstracted: Eyes hunt for human faces. Green horizontals are serene landscapes or sleeping bodies. In photographs, one sees divine divination. A face resembling Christ's, with languid gaze & beard, looms near a couple—visage blooms. An infant laired in father's arms sinks in the murk of emulsion. Floating features cannot be unseen. The Virgin Mary appears on bark, as a singe on grilled-cheese. She glows captive behind glass, millions making pilgrimage. Nature's thunderheads gambol as bestiaries, acrobats, faces. The moon lures sight to discern features. Not Heaven, heaven- ward. A satellite brought light to a towering mask on Mars. A monument? Civilization? No, lenses misread desire for our own species to people space. Even in speech, we seek patterns. The beloved dead seem to hiss, "If you listen hard enough, we'll materialize from static."
PANTHALASSA
after Devil Dog, oil on canvas by Melinda Hackett In a nest of commas, eyes awe. From Sargasso weeds, from brain-coral, bubbles rise. Their hiss vermilions. Swashmarks seep, release empty space. The X-ray of an angel- electrified veins—swims among sunken stars. A school of fingers parts curtains— opium smoke in a bordello. Medusas tattoo ripples— teal on Vandyke brown. Roiling from muck, paint drips into canvas corners, deposits eggs.
NEVER NAME
No, not "never." No, not "nothing." Noting nihilism never negates nor necessitates newer neologisms. Narcotic night never needs needles nor negating nous. Nous? Nigrosine nimbus, nightmarish nomad, navigate Nietzsche. Naught's necropolis? No, nerves' necklace. Nobility's nodding noiselessly. Noonday nonentity, notice nuances: nascent narcissus, not nothingness. Numinous nova, number numb nouns. Nonplused, Nostradamus never notified nations.