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Arts of a Cold Sun

Poems

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Cold Sun

    True Stories about Color


    I leave you with these true stories about color
    and its darkest adaptations:
    how the eye gains by reduced illumination,
    how maximum luminosity shifts
    toward the blues of blood heat,
    while yellow induces fever,
    and purple flames deep like a beet. Or taxi black.
    Or rain gray. Or greenheart hardwood.
    It's never quite right or the same.

    But more: that chilling look in the eyes
    of infants or hurricanes: fate's vermilion,
    burnt umbers of chance ... dancing indigo ... hazel ways.

    The point in all this: the need to believe
    in possessions becoming acceptable. Desires
    coveting registration, numbered carefully
    like colors, become only half the story
    through all this, this intersection of three memories:

    the pure-white courage of the duelist's front foot;
    perpetual black in a patched eye;
    sensational blues true to scars and veins laid open.

    Van Gogh thought the laws of colors
    unutterably beautiful
    just because they are not accidental.
    I would say innocence
    in most colors is predictable as sex ...
    and the religion of art as trustworthy
    as a sleepwalking gambler afraid of his own darks.


    At the Lifeboat Races

    Jersey, Channel Islands

    Seeking the alibi of one vast unmixable shade of blue,
    something between Jaguar-approved
    metallic and that very dark,
    almost black, bottomless color
    the British Navy calls "Blue 3346."

    An optical cliché
    or storm-borne sky,
    blue-gray as integrity.

    At the annual lifeboat races,
    and its concert by the sea,
    a thing of shining and floating resolve
    deep tunnels toward Poonah Lane,
    conducting the night filling to melodies
    with a toss of a 50 p. cigar.

    Lightweight changes and charges,
    reputations at stake—
    involuntary guesses and refusals:

    circling as one, as an idea blueing,
    mirror-frozen,
    like staring into the eye of a chicken.


    Speculation in Dark Air Smoking

    In Lugano, among lost paintings

    You've come now, haven't you, playing on a bad knee,
    unable to shake the feeling of an aphrodisiac for breakfast.
    Thus dream with your eyes stuck open,
    hot for conclave and analogue, the exquisite deal.

    On an empty morning like this,
    know about something
    that will melt you beyond restitution
    or the recourse of a middlebrow portfolio.
    Know old works serve best
    when they haven't been cleaned.
    Know well those absurd meanings
    of harsh words tossed about Thyssen Mansion,
    where in room after room so many saintly paintings
    take possession of you and the thief
    curled in your heart as a worm,
    conforms to your own irregularities.
    Know that, and something less.

    Now we move just one moment shy
    of whatever happens from our time here together,
    from proper imaginings that truly live on
    in strokes of such unsuspecting reality.

    Discovering landscapes by the spadeful
    in long rooms over water, you in shades and leather,
    primed for views of curiosity and extended
    lending. I was about to leave on vacation
    from light incarnate and the aroma of inevitability
    when you called.


    Art of a Cold Sun

    I realize the horse seen from an airplane looks like a violin,
    though it is more and otherwise ... seizing
    gives a shape to jealousy,
    to make-believe sins of off-key laughter,
    as if hiding a mouse
    in my vest pocket ... all of a piece
    from the sun's rude nightly defection.

    One must judge much junk before it becomes someone's art.
    Ever consider the heretical impulse
    as prologue to new orthodoxy,
    complicated as a hair.

    How plausible an eye that could herd scorpions.
    In feral ways, marble-mouthed,
    you come to think of it,
    art's enlightenments
    and the sting of its tail.

    Apologies and claims made.
    Warnings and promises issued.

    Time won't lie, but it'll wink.


    Anointing the Unprepared

    In one disconsolate town, among many rhythms
    now shutting down for second thoughts, you believe
    in both the theory and the plumbing,
    as well as any truths behind winning numbers.

    At times, you become the period to the last paragraph.

    Wistfully provincial, and ready to calculate
    the effects of popular statistics, you wish
    you could, like a French priest, smoke in church—

    this in praise of abstracted spirits
    on a cold spring day in Strasbourg. No question
    about it, no worthy way to proceed
    as if only a few lonely notes struck on a piano,
    jinxed by darkling, instructive times.

    Come the winter season and its need for deep
    listening, you leave directions
    on how to explain the dissolution
    of boundaries among us. There are conditions
    galore for our rattlings and tremors,

    for the suspense of debris in the mirror.
    Schisms necessarily implicate.
    Dogmas resound. Always protocols elsewhere.

    Who loses what when we have more teeth than we need?


    Le Corps Bleu

    Busy and bored as an angel, back to the cypress-lined coast,
    returning as facsimile of the original.

    Face down in serious pleasure,
    a troubled sky's yellow domination laid out—

    too rich to be unkind. I don't lead with the stray stuff
    of memory's hard-ons. Rather,

    I paint water into a ball and clever clouds
    as water, favoring the painter's license

    to practice fate: splicing familiars
    to a new concentration of what's sacred about love

    and its demarcations. With a morning moon
    now slipping toward the cold storage of mid-harbor,

    as both signature and hex. I hijack myself from my strokes,
    piecemeal, scheming out of context. I'd even play

    left-handed if only to gain speed
    between the hand's eye and one eye's uncounseled argument.

    You can snap all that in the back of your hat.


    At Les Deux Magots Restaurant

    At Les Deux Magots Restaurant,
    conversation slips toward the void,
    like a lizard wedged
    into a crack in the wall.

    It's the level of access achieved over time
    that counts.
    It's looking at love without ending
    in stiches.

    I think you've lost it
    although I get the picture.

    When we departed, a stain
    delineating where we'd been,
    hushed and etiolated—
    went someplace, but will return.


    Hide and Seek

    Peeling away skins of the promise
    as if Euro notes,
    making the unknown seen
    maunder in multiple ways. It's rumored Cézanne
    had insomnia the night he died,
    talking to Rembrandt's ghost, as if nothingness
    contained a special métier. Funny how
    what's left of the wicked and sweet
    heart and tongue of madness comes
    with a guarantee of art that looks
    like art, not merely another incredible
    bug in the eye.

    How much could happiness cost anyway,
    as it escapes into you, escapes me, pooh-poohed
    as if love on a glass slide.


    Elizabeth Goose in Autumn

    For Megabeth

    This far too soon into that late afternoon graying.
    Thus, the ghostly season assembles once more.

    How terribly sweet of you to be here now:

    ancient as smoke, disguised as a sigh,
    my Halloween schemer beaming
    anticipation and aftermath: Duck, Duck, Goose:

    your namesake game played out slippery among leaves,

    while the half-orange night rises spellbound
    to shade and echoes hauntingly
    cold enough for these fatherly shivers.

    How suddenly the soon-hereafter mystifies sincerely

    in the wake of windows soaped, pumpkins smashed,
    until your fine wordfoolery: Zip, zap, zolla—
    incantation for a gathering of secret smiles.
    Bewitched, as if one hour soaked in color,
    we surrender to shadows divinely wicked,

    ever sure. Dare-stare or pout, let's deny
    each other early frost, leaving wet street
    to other treats and tricks. So you conjure
    new realm, and then disappearance: Kaboosh!

    So again within our weathers, nothing else
    tonight but news of the dark's dispensations ...
    Time now to venture out from under these great eaves

    during autumns lost forever to hard rain from Paradise.


    South of Spain

    I was climbing this lemon tree looking for breakfast

    there in the crux of suspect times.
    My concessions minor and assumptions near gone,
    troubling only over the sureness of ledges.

    Pretend I'm not here suffering fate's scrapes,
    hanging on as I am, believing already
    in enough delusions of adequacy and wit—
    that's too much the interior grope.

    Notice now the trials of a man chasing up a tree,
    a man in the isolation business,
    who doesn't know the rules, much less any facts.

    I trust that
    circumstances of the phenomenal
    bring on a higher limb of mind.
    Under cold sun, amid side winds, reaching out
    after what's low-hung and chosen,
    falling—ah, but one bite short
    of the eternal.


    Long Story Short

    One marriage, three children, the usual hero-to-hump tale
    of jobs in alternating altitudes, stories of unrequited joy.
    Fresh identities, dramas unseen. Too much of dawn
    going dark, making for a rich meal of dread, when contemplating
    love above the brim.

    You also should talk about dealings with heavy weather
    and one-night agonies, as if descending permanently
    into a single distinction. It boils to skin
    and plain whim, or any fabrication sufficient
    to implicate the act.

    Just then, something glimpsed from a taxi careening
    through Paris, afterimages of a lost father's face
    becomes a tree in the park, tall, rustling with allusions,
    or was it simply cool air stealing across your face—
    that isolation again?


    To the Dogs

    After Buster

    Times when the starting gate closes
    too fast and hard on my tale
    only prove me slow to the bone

    in trophy worlds of fetch and sic.

    I'd wager the trifecta,
    bet the unmuzzled bloodline, being
    a wheel-chaser at heart, cold bark at dawn,

    afraid at last to outrun the faux rabbit.

    I'll see you backstretch. I'll bite
    a bit. I'll circle and circle until
    I feel it's time to put down instinctively—

    late last days now counted in dog-years.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Arts of a Cold Sun by G. E. Murray. Copyright © 2003 by G. E. Murray. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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