It Closing in It Whispers

Pleasure and disgust, the border of desire, of aesthetics, where beauty and the uncanny meet—is this the brink one must always live on, bare and bear, the vulnerability necessitated in feeling alive? (Nuar Alsadir, “Sketch 64,” Fourth Person Singular)

  

1.

 

Francis Bacon at the Met: hours

with the paintings

                                    leering

at every one of them

                                       (and glancing here and there

at those hot boys who pass

too quickly by)

                                      shifting

                                                       circling

an un-kind lust

         mingling

the surface     the space     inside

the frame

                   tremulous.

 

Then deflated

with the absence

of Two Men on a Bed, one of his most erotic.

   (Brutal, you would add.)

Tender, I think. And no

Man at Curtain, no Study from the Human

Body or ice-gray glow of Two Figures

at a Window in an eclipsed rock-blue room.

 

But then: Head I, one of the earliest paintings, early 1948.

I stare at it at length, skin flapping in the frame

to extract my small face from its glass, convinced:

 

it’s some substrate struggling for form, some unminded

storm of forces half-dispersed

                                                     desiring at being

One while wanting for want           substanceless

muck without world:

 

whatever it is

it is not I: Head

                                half on, ill-

                                                           shaped: flesh mottled gray

                                                                                                                   matter: eyes swollen

shut or glazed over: embryonic: face

                                                                  all mouth round mouth four

fangs angling each other:

                                              mouth a clot of blood

inside muscling

toward a moan: staring

at me staring

at the painting trying still

to shut my face your face

behind the glaring wall placed between us

to protect us, one from the other, my head

still bobbing for an opening

I can slip through:   cracked open

                                                            I almost break down:

hold back in fear hold back don’t

                                                            smear don’t bleed

   the bruising pigment with tears

                                                            flash of wine-splash

        from a smacked mouth: still

                                                            a small almost-sob escapes, a sigh,

                                                            a quick-intake and repudiation of

                      breath: eruption of some thing

                                                            the glass has

                no will or way to stave           

                                                            takes leave.

 

 

2.

 

I go further in

to the museum looking

to replenish 

some sense 

of space

from Bacon, to recompose myself in

a Rothko

(or, who knows, with luck,

just maybe in one of those quick-zipping men)—so I go

seeking to float out into what currents

I can and I

 

turn the corner stop:   dead in a start:                    the shark

scraping against the glazed skin of the seen to get at me,

this shark I didn’t know was in the States, let alone here

                         here                    heaves

forward toward

the shark-

                     mouth gape-

eyed and

leering at me leering:              Its prey,

                         

                                                glass cannot

                    protect me from

 

the gaze                       the mouth                    that mouth

 

that blazes                   black sun                     blackens

 

this shark’s                 dead eyes                    full-throated

 

void it calls                 it calls                          and closer

 

It could only be

this shark, this

second carcass, a shark 

just like it, but not the original.

Only this museum, the Metropolitan, or a museum

laid out the same. Like so fallen a heaven

                                                                           as The Physical

                           Impossibility of Paradise,

the imperceptible Death

in the Mind of the insensible perceptions of Someone

Living (originally executed in 1991

                                                                 shark replaced in 2006           

now white clouds its expressions)

                                                                                                            expressed gases floating

                                                                        above it

a few rays behind

those reflections within reflections

the glass tank swims off into                   

                                                                                                                                    the glass walls

of that side

of this gallery

in the Met:

shark head replicating

                                                       infinity in miniature over

                                                                                                                  5^th Avenue. So peaceful

this

mouth-

like Bacon scream

hovering in its sea-blue

tankful of formaldehyde. Surprisingly

beautiful (what beautiful means)              

                                                              to be stricken to be

taken. Thought from

the first it was pure

hoax. Seeing photos of it

differently installed (or was that the first

fish, the closed-mouthed?), reading about the piece, about Hirst’s other works,

the bifurcated

sheep and cows—I thought it must be

the inert sort of conceptual gesture that fails

to penetrate, to interpellate: to call out to call into

being: my breathing, my movements

of expansion and response, calling me into its own—until I saw it, there,

 

installed to eternally return in the glass wall

of that particular room in the Met. Display lights scoring the symphonic depths

it soars

unswimming in, engorged and gorgeously eerie

glow. That crowned hole,

its pillowed palate itching to swallow in its entirety

my slight frame, every enfleshed soul in this museum—our sense

of sight itself—every single thing and that thing’s inside-outwarding into

 

the world.

 

I sit with it

 

for a long time.

 

I sit with it very near                          

 

absolute stasis.

 

Sit with its ellipses

in the window over the car-barking street,

the window-pocked buildings

glaring back

their annoyance, that light-struck cloud

let to blue.

 

Circle around it and around. Sit. Flesh flecking off

even still: this form can’t hold, formaldehyde or not: art and science aside,

muscle and cartilage, even teeth

break down: the hide frays: none of us can stay.

 

And out of nowhere                 

                                                out of nothing                  

                              —   The museum is   —

 

—   closing in   —

measured time

is shutting down

this last moment.

The museum

closing in on

the Physical

Impossibility.

The mouth the eyes

too will go.

The guards having

disappeared,

I take something

of it with me.

(Something other

than the photos

I never look at now.)

 

—   fifteen minutes   —

 

Is that how long,

not fame, not fortune,

but anything kin,

in the 21^st century,

to transcendence 

lasts?

(Look at them now,

so wanting.)

 

 

3.

 

On the slow walk out, I pass back through

the howling Bacons, the last

of the crowd (no longer even half-looking

for a mere hook-up)

no longer exactly hungry but wholly sated, sated and still

whetted for more, for the summer-humid air, for all the faces perched

on the front steps, along the bannisters, mapping their way to dinner (and okay, yes,

the sideways slide of that man’s tongue up my bent neck does flash over)

from mouth

to mouth, room

after room to the exit, the front stairs, the early evening streets extending into

this calm exhilaration—this circulation of the substanceless

substances that compose and decompose us

recompose through us throw us

through the gullet of it into the world-rivering a bit further down now the teeth

in my back your chest the snaring marks the bracketing scare quotes

lighter now around the world around us

more real this illusion and only exhalation of

the remains of:

 

the never-shaken unknown:     unknowable:                                   —   heaves   —

 

What else

does beautiful mean

but ennerving

invigorating

and vacating:

Mere pleasure binds us

together the same, Barthes (that lovely loner)

whispers behind us,

                                    And bliss

undoes us

again.