Читать книгу Chord - Rick Barot - Страница 12

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. Only more dark growing in the dark.