by Brenda Hillman

1

Attempting to describe paint dear
someone arrives at the left

and says Hello Nice Echo.

New clove oil keeps
a green cliff

rivery but how long
will the shininess survive? — ~ —

Long enough to try by itself
which is totally fine because

I would like to record

a feeling that isn’t there.

2

A little rip in the thought
violence;

paint is just another kind of
victim.

In the play between constriction and
destruction
something is risked among the agate clothes;

we hear him talking through
the stroke~

the particles have come through uncritically but

really, it is Marx coming through like

spirits of the Baader-Meinhof who hanged themselves.

3

I looked below

the air behind the paintings.

It was trying to do something
unsystematic with our angel till

there was nothing to keep except

chance;

I made my eyes pointy to look at air in
corners,

the strong vertical inside that sucks itself
down in the gesture of

a tear, then a miracle revealed a
blue lake.

4

To have an argument
with existence you can wait

till it says something then
say nothing. With the speed

inside set to your childhood

a fleck of grandfather’s barn comes through the nicely
drying doves,~

so many more colors than the one
you’re obsessed with. The kir

of a candy c/zar we once knew—

was a rose buried in there too?
your hope for it is yes.

5

With the fire that has gathered in me

I put my head to the wall to see the gargoyle
pushing
from the back of the painting—it loves and chokes the painting—

but no use; details are spurs that hurt us
when we try to mount extra beauty. The artist

has proceeded with not one
color but

twins which is why art historians sound stoned.

N sitting on the floor under #8 holding her bandage up

for here, we’re little divers
giving Oz value to hiding behind the curtain~

6

Great paint resists the character. You
know this.
If you tilt your head sideways the

smoothness

feels

something. It does not tell you till the magic

probes. The air tripling and crippling,

D holds our hand as
we nearly skip the ladder up to air

that rises behind the east
where bombing is. Great bird perched in

the limb/o where contradiction kills time.

7

To escape
the war we watched a color
field with its line

emphatically drawn in a daily

way;

our love had dreamed and faced
the bedspread

from a wide-wing chair;

what has never not
existed grows horizons

in it. Why bother trying to

trap it with description.

8

You shouldn’t ever say
you’ll give up art. Why did you say that? Take it back.

The interesting length is always death

but paint and ink
resist no matter

what

stages of furious alarm are
set;

the combed paint takes a line

from Hamlet—a point in fact
that hesitates. How strange to give up wanting. Life’s

action amazes you.