The Art of Navigation

He set black and white on fire.

-- Harry Gaugh on Franz Kline

The rugged brushstroke of the dying oak

is left standing for a week, limbless

as the marriage we find ourselves

dismantling. Without leaves

or branches to create perspective,

trunk and sky, shape and space, equilibrate（平衡，相称）

in the same plane, a balance of black

on white, white on black,

like the sketch Franz Kline enlarged,

in 1949, on a Bell-Optican projector,

crosscut of a junk-shop wooden rocker

he loved to paint as much as he loved

and painted his wife Elizabeth, Elizabeth

already lost then in her dark refrain.

When he saw himself in a book

she gave him -- Nijinsky as Petrouchka --

Franz painted that face to its grave. Over

and again he laid the dancer down, poor

swallowed soul, cheeks pinched（压紧的，痛苦的） hollow,

bent head pinioned by harlequined

hatband, lidless eyes eyeing nothing

but his own foreshortened depths.

Years of tracing, retracing steps

until the facts of the matter distilled

to stark architecture, passionately

unconcerned with finish --

Elizabeth, Elizabeth --

the same dark refrain（叠句，副歌） --

But today the tree crew returns

to finish the job. One shimmies

up rope to test what's solid or void, and log

the byproduct for winter. Now he shouts

he's found monarchs, just a small clump

high on the bare trunk, resting up,

absorbing the sun's heat: this time of year

they route their way by warmth --

Some paths depend on abstraction

(the blind foraging of sleeping backs

until the spines meet, hinge into wings).

who knows how invisible lines

line the visible better than an old

sight-gagged clown? So teach, you paint-

and-pain-masked mime. I can't find my way

any other way. Teach me to read maps

in the cadmium and singe-veined flakes

of monarchs brush-fired and dispersed

on a breeze, in the tree that

with the lightest of gestures,

like a finger touched against flesh,

the chainsaw opens, ring after ring.

-- in memory of Larry Levis