Eradicating the Rodent
 
​
Picasso said to Braque, I see a squirrel
in your painting, there among the table top
items—tobacco pouch, pipe, etc. No,
said Braque, until he looked again;
he was, after all, a formalist
in control of what the viewer does and does not see.
 
Now that you mention it, I can’t not see
it there. Annoying rodent, haplessly squirreled
away in mind, cracking the formalist’s
nut. Picasso, was, of course, at the top
of his game, and had nothing to lose or gain
if someone spotted a penguin where no
 
bird was, in an etching, say, of two blue figures we know
are alone, with a heel of bread, some wine. We could see
the interloper and laugh again,
as now we see it/now we don’t. He could kill the squirrel
if it twitched its nose, bring down his brush hard on the top
of its skull. Those silly, gutless, control-freak formalists
 
got it all wrong. But what happens when formal
coherence is attempted in an abstract composition. No
need to explain or eradicate. A spinning top
appears, let it twirl, as long as you want to see
it, spin along, watch for its bite, but feed the squirrel,
and after losing yourself in dots & swirls & shapes, look again
 
to see them transformed. A jazz musician gains
your trust by introducing a well-known form
of a melody, seizing it, mocking it, then squirrelly
letting it dissolve into the chord changes. He knows
that we know, just as the painter will see
what we see, and each time it’s like taking it from the top,
 
once more, like a simple gift, cherry on the top
accidental, momentary, stage front, dropped again
to foment desire. Don’t you see
how it works? How formalism
abhors a vacuum, that there should be no
need for eradication. Look, gone in a flash, that squirrel.
 




Fish                                                                                                                                              
 
Why does everything come back to fish?                              
The time of year when the Maumee River    
is flush with human jetties, casters, waist-deep         
in the chill, arms like pistons, their manic Spring quest       
for Walleye insatiable. The catch won’t be served   
for dinner, though--fear of poisoning their young.    
 
Turn to the musings of Carl Jung
to make sense of synchronicity, his take on fish,
beginning with a human-aquatic figure that served
as an ancient alchemical inscription. On the river
bank he encountered a giant creature in its quest
to reach water, only to disappear in the deep.
 
That same day, he saw a patient, in deep
despair, recount terrifying dreams she had as a young
girl, and her whole adult life had become a quest
to make sense of those giant nightmare fish
that continued to haunt her. Later, at a cafe on the river,
he savoured freshly caught rainbow trout served
 
by a waiter named Fischel. In dreams, the archetype serves
as stand-in for libido or greed; or if it’s deep
in the sea--unconscious urges; if it leaps out of a river
then fright or redemption. When I was young,
hard as I tried, I was never able to hook a fish.
Though I did set out on various quests,
 
or set forth (into the dark wood) to use language of quest,
to find the exact cause I was meant to serve.
I knew of the Grail and the aged, wounded Fisher
King from Weston’s Ritual to Romance, I was deep
in The Psychology of Transference by Jung.
I kept my implacable sense that this river
 
(and all rivers like it) was the River
separating the living from the dead, the ques-
toner from the question, and that while I was young,
I had to dive in, for everything’s a matter of serving
or being served. And how to approach the deep
recessed pools of the incorporeal, commanding fish.





Faust Dancing
 
 
The only time I danced in a ballet,                            
I was already old, at least too old to appear              
on stage in tights. I was taking a class,                      
not my first, culminating in a performance,              
15 weeks of frappé, dégagé, at the barre                   
followed by chaîné, assemblé in the center.  
           
I was never comfortable being the center
of attention, you’d think I’d avoid ballet,
that my masculine-American sense would bar
me from that realm. Oh, I could claim appearance
is not reality, that I relished performing
behind the girl in the backless leotard, in class
 
to improve her volleyball spikes, or that the class
was good exercise a way to center
myself—all about balance and focus. We performed
a dance from Charles Gounod’s Faust ballet,
and from the audience reaction it would appear
that I, lone male among females, for 100 bars,
 
held my own. Afterwards, I stopped by a bar
for a beer, several, a working class
establishment and marvelled at the appearance
and sudden disappearance of a throbbing in the center
of my chest, when the three-quarter time music of the ballet
edged out the jukebox grind, as my inner organs performed
 
ecstatically. It would have been quite a performance
if the dart-tossing couples or the hot bar-
tender weren’t distracted by the basketball ballet
leaping dunk on the large screen. I tell my classes
that Greek philosophers always aim for the center,
that Kant is a brilliant fanatic, that appearance
 
always undermines reality, that empiricists appear
to be reasonable but are not, that truth is performative,
that Yeats was right—the center
cannot hold and nothing we can do will bar
the beast from bearing down upon us. My class
is popular, but my students would learn more from ballet.