Again we’re talking of “conservation” and “efforts”
not of, say, a rainforest, but of landscapes
in oils or acrylics, and I was never an art student
past the age of ten—so I learn new words
like “hatching,” and “leaving,”
how these terms have alternate meanings;
how a bird lays an egg in one hemisphere,
the wind draws clockwise in another.
I don’t know how to tell you I’m fearful
of a world that ends in us still
unfree—that I’m fearful, not of an “if”
but a pattern, resolute and discriminatory
as a God. Yes, stillness is an absence
but also the indication of everything
in the past and up to this point.
Still, I don’t want to scare you
but understand I’m talking about both.
Everything in a museum has a shelf
-life. Each portrait comes with its own inherent
inevitable. We must slow it—
there are careers built around saving
our things from our own
vices: stalling, we are stalling,
I am stalling, to a later end.
END. E N D. I find it littering
my notebook—looming
E N D
E N D
E N D
I write it on the page when my mind
wanders. END D D D D in scribbles and scrawls.
E N D in blackened bubble letters, etched black
holes, hatchings stretching out
from the margins.
E N D
E
N
D
I am losing meaning.
Image Credit: “Jacob Lawrence, 1955, for New York Artists Equity Association’s volume VI publication of Improvisations” by Jacob Lawrence, permitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license from Wikimedia Commons.
