War of the Foxes. Richard Siken
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Contents
Contents
2 Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors
3 Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede
4 Birds Hover the Trampled Field
7 Still Life with Skulls and Bacon
8 Landscape with Several Small Fires
9 Detail of the Fire
10 War of the Foxes
11 Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light
12 Three Proofs
13 Ghost, Zero, Suitcase, and the Moon
14 Logic
15 Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One
16 The Field of Rooms and Halls
17 The Mystery of the Pears
18 Dots Everywhere
19 The Museum
20 The Stag and the Quiver
21 Detail of the Woods
22 Landscape with Black Coats in Snow
23 Self-Portrait against Red Wallpaper
24 Glue
25 Turpentine
26 The Story of the Moon
27 The Worm King’s Lullaby
28 The Painting That Includes All Painting
About the Author
Acknowledgments
THE WAY THE LIGHT REFLECTS
The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects,
so what’s there to be faithful to? I am faithful
to you, darling. I say it to the paint. The bird floats
in the unfinished sky with nothing to hold it.
The man stands, the day shines. His insides and
his outsides kept apart with an imaginary line—
thick and rude and imaginary because there is
no separation, fallacy of the local body, paint
on paint. I have my body and you have yours.
Believe it if you can. Negative space is silly.
When you bang on the wall you have to remember
you’re on both sides of it already but go ahead,
yell at yourself. Some people don’t understand
anything. They see the man but not the light,
they see the field but not the varnish. There is no
light in the paint, so how can you argue with them?
They are probably right anyway. I paint in his face
and I paint it out again. There is a question
I am afraid to ask: to supply the world with what?
LANDSCAPE WITH A BLUR OF CONQUERORS
To have a thought, there must be an object—
the field is empty, sloshed with gold, a hayfield thick
with sunshine. There must be an object so land
a man there, solid on his feet, on solid ground, in
a field fully flooded, enough light to see him clearly,
the light on his skin and bouncing off his skin.
He’s easy to desire since there’s not much to him,
vague and smeary in his ochers, in his umbers,
burning in the open field. Forget about his insides,
his plumbing and his furnaces, put a thing in his hand
and be done with it. No one wants to know what’s
in his head. It should be enough. To make something
beautiful should be enough. It isn’t. It should be.
The smear of his head—I paint it out, I paint it in
again. I ask it what it wants. I want to be a cornerstone,
says the head. Let’s kill something. Land a man in a
landscape and he’ll try to conquer it. Make him
handsome and you’re a fascist, make him ugly and
you’re saying nothing new. The conqueror