Chord. Rick Barot
Читать онлайн книгу.
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.
THE WOODEN OVERCOAT
It turns out there’s a difference between a detail
and an image. If a dandelion on the sidewalk is
mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep
is an image because it moves when her body does,
even when a shirt covers up the little black sun
on a thin stalk. The same way that the barcode
on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail,
until you hear that the row of numbers underneath
are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm
in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.