"SCENE WITH NUDE," HELEN FRANKENTHALER, 1952

I have no memories
in which I am not impossibly young
my experience formless as a flower's
or a color's, yellow
lights living briefly across a wall
Tomorrow I'll think of the me of today
and she'll remain illegible,
letters on a deflated balloon.
I have misjudged accuracy.
Is it possible to paint myself so precisely
I disappear? Can I remember myself
so completely I'm erased? Unraveling
to abstraction—a charcoal thatch
like the one from which I came—
is a method of survival. Whenever I try to understand               
myself I suffer.  What is that long green shape
doing there, relaxed
on the space I'd call the ground
I don't see anything I recognize
here      Who am I
to think I could deliver
consciousness back
into this room
Most true things are also impossible
to decipher   the green shape
What is that green shape
resting between two forms
we can agree are likely legs—that green shape
free, as if it was once part of the body
and is now, at last, enlightened
Oh god please don't tell me it's life
The kind of life only I could live
and therefore do not want

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"BODY"

I repeat the word so it begins its loss

of meaning—meaning lifeless

finally I can command it

into pure sound    a prayer

the mouth makes   abstract

as air & beyond recognition

as God: another word

which masks too much I'm afraid

I'll stumble in this body

beneath the thought's weight

heavy as a human

dense with water   facedown in a pool—

drowned or performing

death? or allowing itself to fall

slack for a half minute

to the pleasure of dissolving

into similes the sunlight's theories

playing on the pool's floor,

the pleasure of playing

dead to wrap its head around it

& make it more than word,

giving death a context,

giving itself permission to be passive,

not the voice in the mouth but the teeth

the tongue pushes off of like a swimmer

racing to meet the air

—but with my hands outstretched

as if mid-stroke I catch myself. I always catch myself.

I can tell because I'm still here speaking

the body the way the body repeats

its breath, unthinking—the relief

of going weightless

in the water after the long monotony of a day inside

the body, always there,

I cannot—like a word

in a sentence typed in a book—

put it down, the body

unlike a word

is not a choice,

there always, always there

is this meaninglessness

or meaning, knowing that when I end

I'll just begin again

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