EPITAPH
I know there are other things the water can be sure of
just as the graffiti on beach sand, or the copyright insignia
on the lower right hand-side of every chest is marked
in red by something else. We all belong to something, and
today with your family in circles there’s a re-make of a re-
make, an homage to Courbet, an homage to Larry Rivers
searching his heart for something to copy from Courbet,
and then being slightly grateful that someone the he cared
so deeply for cooperated and then died. This lineage is so
confusing, a bibliography of emotion. First there was
the crying and then the understanding of the wound. First
I saw blood trickle from my cousin’s shoe, his laughter
at this game of tag, and then the silence. And the shock.
And screaming. These are all variations on a theme
by God. Birth and death and then rebirth into something
else, the mockery of branding. This is Courbet
painting a burial of the horizon as mourners
in every gallery cannot discern where painting is
any longer. Death to art, to bushy-bearded Gustave,
long live painting and Larry Rivers scribbling
his variations of the mundane. What could be
more gratifying and repetitious than a cup of coffee,
than neglect of three death dimensions, than death?
There are numbers here, not of mourners but measurements:
This many feet, this many inches down. This many
displaced moments of dirt and then replacement.
How many hours until the house, how many minutes
more before we’re no longer are alive? Long live
painting, the comment of Larry Rivers making a copy
of a copy, a Burial in Ornans and the flat surface, the flat
face lack-of-depth moment recognizes nothing
will survive. How far is it from here, this set of tears
and tragedy, to a sudden burst of uncontrollable
laughter? To a miracle of smearing paint that allows
for mistake in all this that is already far too predictable?
Is any of this different from constructing individual
religions on each wall of bland Manhattan? A copyright
insignia stating life is compact disc music set to skipping,
same old-same old SAME-O beat resampled SAMO and
regenerated, the sound of heartbeats become cliché. Behold
the miracle of resurrection between break beats, between
Courbet and his grand funeral procession, Larry Rivers and his
pre-made sorrow, and Basquiat as epigraph or epilogue, eulogy
for the bare tombstones of city skyscrapers that spread out
in minimalist torture down every city block. This is measuring
New York, and then everything beyond. These numbered streets
and names so familiar you forget their meaning. Like funeral
can be a word and an occasion, like wake is a set of opposites,
both joyous and then you leave. I guess I haven’t told you
about my latest small world discovery: How William Carlos Williams
attended to a woman Larry Rivers got pregnant, performed
a free-of-charge abortion in support of free expression. In support
of poetry and the arts. How can we so small that the distance
between our circumstance is so very, very small? How tiny
can everything be if people are stealing Picassos from Ernest
Hemingway’s old mansion, picking up a poor simile of a cat
and then bounding down the street? How preposterous to find
a postcard that misspells a name? Or one you may have saved to send
later to yourself, a tragedy of time in your somewhat older hands.
And shouldn’t each correspondence be half question-mark and only
then half-period, like each coupling in the bedroom is? The reason
for all this groaning is every second that we breathe can be split
toward birth and death. Long live Courbet, would have been a sentence
in my philosophy today, his bloated artist’s body hovering
toward the snacks. Long live Larry Rivers and the arts, the things
we leave unborn, and the friends we collect shameful favors from,
some shred of understanding in paint globs and maybe line breaks.
Long live the searching for meaning at the end of a set of words,
the last gasps fingertips make as they fondle humid air, the sheets
and the curve of a lover’s face in impossible winter forever. Long
remains our sense of death and dying, the procession as flat
and meaningful as the grand-sized machines of the ever-present
paint strokes of larger-than-life Gustave Courbet. Long gone
are the wishes we could push to something different. Same old song,
as breathing does, resists and then comes to a stop. Set each track
on repeat and dance into the night. In Manhattan and beyond
the city is a set of tombs, each recorded with an epitaph. Maybe,
I told you I was sick, or To the child who never breathed. The sunset
breaks to shadows, your family exchanges gossip. All of this is
predictable. Drug addicts filled with liquid to replace each tube
of discharged paint, a procession of the line, and of the stain, flip-
flopped against art history as everything remains unchanged. Maybe,
What is that new painting you’ve been working on, Have you tried
these chicken fingers? Your other cousin, you notice now, is slightly
larger than the last canvas someone stretched in your studio space,
all blank and waiting for regurgitated ideas to reconstruct themselves
in black and white, in night, and then in daybreak. And in the buzz
of endings, someone always reappears, stops and refills your drink.