Another Culmination Of The Whole Thing

Basalt, scoria, obsidian, tuff.
Chalk, chert, flint, shale. Gritstone, mudstone, greywacke.
Slate. Skarn. Marble. Anthracite. Suevite. Gneiss.
Never, never take your schist for granite.

A Mexican meteor, curio
to sexy T. Rexy, freeze fries dinos
munching about the crusty pyrolite.
Home or away, astrophysics bats last.

With the remote in your hand, you summon
national pastimes with geologic
logic. The bearded closer shuts the door
in the last frame, but you go down swinging.

Why go down looking when you could making?
Like Bird, torn horn in paper bag…Pepper
salting that tag with wit…Miles proving
just how fucking funny a valentine

should be. The whack is where the art is. Call
it a victory and get the hell out. Death
the last refuge of life, tiny the last
refuge of huge, purple the last refuge

of yellow, Happy the last refuge of
twelve bars slash hurt blues. The throaty river
finds itself in cold canyon, and says to
the canyon wren, “Hell, I made this canyon.”

But also: upthrust. Grains of doubt. Groggy
mornings when your hummingbird hands didn’t
work. This looks good and that’s enough. Fizzing
the surface, a suspended load rises.

Let’s bridge that canyon the way a doctor
might cure your disease or your snappish tongue
her pussy of its existential angst.
Let X be void, and Y void solid. Probe.

Gravity’s nature sucks. Let it. Downstream
the current circles back, recalcitrant,
contrary, gurgling eddy-line a fence
between fashion and your own indifference

to it. Cutbank, whirlpool, boil, where you
lived: in the slow strong current lazing fast-
idiously upstream. On your back, floating
now. Eddied out. The sky tastes delicious.

Well, this may be the last time you see me.
This may be the last time you see me well.
Well, this may be the first time you see me.
This may be the first time you see me well.

For Jackson, Sydney, and Happy Price, and Romy Colonius, on the occasion of the opening of the Ken Price’s posthumous retrospective, “Ken Price: Sculpture,” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 16, 2012