CHICAGO
—after De Kooning’s Excavation, housed at the Art Institute of Chicago
Approaching in these sunshowers
there’s a sense of what it might be like
to be plagued by rainbows. Proof even
abstract shapes have a likeness. And do you
have any idea how difficult it is
to take snapshots of color arcing over
pastures, driving in the worst traffic
you’ve ever seen? With slippery knees,
there’s very little room for missing
and mistake, especially through this
ambiguity of space: big rigs, trees, crops,
sky, clouds, and stretching. On the way,
tiny gas station post office convenience
store towns offer scratch ticket
big game money I already spent. And sale
bubblegum, enough for sore jaws
while shouting out 2 more songs
to busting I-beam skies— the radio’s
thinking too loud and tuning fingers
scan between big, small, and useless.
These shapes and similarity create
security better than fenders or bumpers
do, while cell phone gabbing, crane-
necked people whiz by in bent, paint-
stained stripes, and imitate melting.
At least be grateful it’s not so
hot with this rain. Like 28 people
died from heat this year, and St. Peter
will not let you into heaven if you go
without a fan. Raindrops packed too
tight, the seams between collapse in
on themselves, like after Excavation,
like frigid rain in the strangest place
and the pity of being homesick, the water
moves grass-hilled wind, sits
in the bottom of the glass. One part
too thick for drinking, driving, and three
parts less believable, my prayers
have included closing one eye. But of course,
none of this is believable, and buried
beneath my skin my clothes
my seat the road fragments of layered
newsprint slow the drying of this experience
that slows the paint on other photos too—
a glorious impression of colliding image
and brand new products of forgetting.
But now the road, the water, me,
and unearthing anything, is moving
on toward the ocean. There’s a green glow
through wiper blades, white writing shown
erased, shown erased, shown skidding by
erased. And seen through people are ghosts
of imagery, collage, or tall columns
of type— this complexity of any
individual’s experience, especially
in urban environments, is central. That’s
what I keep remembering! There’s road,
and escape without holes is the cat’s meow.
The very thing— this traveling, inside-outside,
cheers structures toward collapse, without
remains of fragmented anatomy, or dirt
of any kind. Underneath the car, the tar
combines for intersections, buildings, stoplights
green, blink yellow, blink red, and all up the street
these relationships of glass and space
know, and reveal more than us, or decomposing—
they develop a greater richness of meaning, love
within form, a relationship of steam shovel
and backhoe, tire, tread, skyline, and that imitated
sea— and explain how understanding, and commitment
are bonds that bow before the digging— within,
without— and eventually dissolve to words, progress,
horns or yelps, before there’s change,
or leaving, or even meaning to.