There are these moments of abstract expression
as if Frankenthaler inhabited one’s divan
or Picasso painted one’s portrait,
that allows one to step back and assess,
and live a life like one long litmus test:
Are we there?
These reflections in oil, the plastic pools,
pinch off a cell’s umbilical surrender,
and speed its delivery to a destination
destined. The peculiarities of the abstract
self remember all too well the breach of promise:
pinched off, they form a pool of bruises
and tints what stands close and near.
Wherefore the long last night
remembered too long since, the time
and place of the pool and bruises
—face through the surface—
my daughter:
The steps taken to order the evening
(the shouts, the flagrancies, the waving of arms,
the paralyzed graces), the spasm toward the pool
all at once filled with the steps forward and back
and sideways
that fill one’s life with a peculiar order
and fate—fates?—that might be, that may be—
the steps down through the watery part of the painting
of my daughter drowned
and back out to a sea of abstraction.
