Ode to Joy

Frank O’Hara wrote, No more dying. And Joan Mitchell
painted a 110 ½ x 197 ¼ response. The wedge of gold

near the top, the streaks of gold dripping down. I once
believed in the gold because I was born excessive.

Maybe we all are. But how can I write more like the
gold lines near the bottom of the painting? Can

language do what a painting does: evoke joy? Why does
language inhabit some of us, paint others? A

metaphor has a body first, then a shadow. A chair is a
chair before it can be civilization. In painting, the gold

line evokes and conjures meaning, isn’t meaning itself,
can skip meaning. The meaning of words gets in my

way. I have spent my life saying what I mean, but sadly.
Joy must be in separation, in the dripping off after the

sadness. I try to separate language from meaning: gold
minus, gold wind, gold don’t. No matter how I try, I

can’t seem to lose meaning. Shattered wither, hard
bitten, disordered else, ruby longing. Let me go back to

the beginning of this poem and let it drip down: the
trees streak dying. No more deaths. I remember

wedges of wither. Joy after meaning. I have moved
radiance forward.

Central Park

The moon in the painting came through the branches
like applause. The tree trunks looked just like the

stones, the stairs, and the people. I, too, had nowhere to
move. I was anxious about the threshold. That if I went

too close to the hole in the ground, the search would
end. Alice Neel said, When you’re an artist, you’re

searching for freedom . . . in fact, art can be called the
search. I want to ask Neel if something can be called a

search if the object isn’t reachable? What if language is
glass blown but not made of glass. How do we live as

artists without dislocating language? Without viewing
the present as an errand of death? Maybe the search

Neel refers to is just seeing. The painting is what has
outlived seeing. Maybe the seeing itself is freedom, for

the looker and the object. No matter how divided. After
fifty years of separation, I now try to see everything

together, in the present—all the white hotel sheets of
the foreground, the dead people in the background,

the birds flying in airports in the middleground. This way, seeing
and salvation stop rejecting each other.

This way, everything is a dome versus a line. And everything
gets recognition at once.