Ode to Merce
So long maestro —
we don’t mourn you;
you’ve always walked with the sages.
When will we enter again that summerspace?
Your ethereal garden of pointed light,
where birds disperse into spiral oblivion,
and fawns hurl against forest-blur —
of Rauschenberg.
How I loved —
there,
like never —
the vehement unravelings of flighted bodies,
those seraphic bipeds in
lustrous falls
and risings,
each leap a shove toward
undying,
each sweep a sublimation
into life.
Who will ferry us to your rainforest?
That silvery paradise of
pillowed air,
where noble beasts romp
amidst our lunar
Elysium.
Who will deliver us your sounddance?
That savage cacaphony of startled starlings,
writhing forth in wrathful grace.
You awakened us
from ourselves:
shocked us from beauty
we supposed —
impelled us to beauty
we fear.
And so we become sighted;
ordained;
witness —
to sublime torso forms,
to ardent linearity,
to distant urgency,
to intimate separatism,
to chance,
to entropy,
to chaotic synchrony,
to paradoxic coincidence,
to choric swarms of sinuosity,
to possibilities unfathomed,
to ephemerality,
to a logic without us,
to ends without us,
to the end of us,
to beauty for its own,
to grace for its own,
to movement for its own;
so we might stride
aside our selves —
these narrow narratives of
our strivings,
these exalted da das
of our soul — post-modern.
Photograph by JUN HUA EA
