James McCorkle
Text / Image
Nine Windows. Winter, Rome
—on Cy Twombly’s Nine Discourses of Commodus
1.
“There isn’t anything to the paintings” (Donald Judd)
Winter of 1963—
The background for each is a uniform
battleship gray
hard as the winter sky, Piazza del Biscione in Rome (composition)
such gray tyranny, stepchild
to chaos
2.
Drawn and quartered
In the colosseum the arena a line drawn
down the middle
bodies pulled apart impastos of white, red, fatty yellows
(“If they do the chant, we'll see what happens, I don’t know that you can stop people”)
Drips, scruffs, scribblings
matter, material, scab, fecal, famine, pestilence
“the rule of law”
3.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
“It was on the night of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last line of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.”—Gibbon, Autobiography
4.
Floating across the panels
a square, penciled, a grid such precision tenuous, fragile, an icy crystal
compass flower rose, five points (cardinal, and one toward the heart, the interior,
blood and soul, the red disc hummingbirds lift from)
(In each of the nine panels a progression
from titanium white, scrubbed clouds (the divinities disappearing, retreating
were they ever here, in the waves, sky, moist earth? will they return, to pray for us?)
toward a bolus of cadmium red, a renting apart, what spills forth
from a body
left unburied, in the middle of
a gray expanse).
No photographs allowed.
5.
In Saigon, on June 11, 1963, Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death.
Tied to his brother, both shot in the back of the head
Ngô Đình Diệm, president of Viet Nam,
Ngô Đình Diệm who brutalized Buddhist monks—or, be honest,
at least 1400 disappeared in purges in August 1963 as part of Diệm’s anti-Buddhist agenda
Ngô Đình Diệm was assassinated by his generals on November 1, 1963
weeks before JFK
Lodge and Harriman washed their hands of the affair, having no use for Diệm
and the generals promised short work of the Việt Minh
(who were the resistance to Japanese and French colonialism)
(I watched fighters practicing landing at MacDill AFB, deployments were expected
the war that was not a war that consumed
like napalm and teargas) While in Rome
Cy Twombly was painting madness
That in 1964, his gallery in NYC hung the nine panels out of order declaring them
precocious and Europeanized irrelevance
from the cottony whites
the mass, excised, bloody, cadmium red was thrown on to the steel gray examination table
6.
Context is everything.
7.
Where I saw the 9 Discourses
in another room
angels’ wings
hundreds of human scapulae arranged near a wall, a pile, three feet high
of femurs and mandibles, human, were placed in part, the artist, Jenny Holzer
was referencing the Balkan war the Syrian war the holocausts the tyrannies
that orchestrated ethnic cleansings and the feminicide of each, re/current tyranny
(later, I dreamt I was watching the arrest of Lorca
the soldiers kept shouting
where is the school teacher, where is he
as they pushed past small men in the building mending their clothes
heavy-breasted women bathing
clambering toward an attic room, pushing Lorca up the stairs—
but of course there was no school-teacher in the house Lorca was living in,
he would be thrown into the same car as Lorca
and taken into the dry foothills
and executed alongside the poet who sang of angels)
only art allows us to live past exterminations
all the derelictions, of
mind or spirit, of imagination, the gray wrapping sheets
covering each
8.
There is nothing delicate here, instead the violence of application
paint heaped and smeared on
or the flatness of the gray, the sureness of line, taut as piano wire
as what cuts you in or out, life or that side
(drunk, dull with poison
your whore will smuggle in a slave to strangle you, Commodus:
too fouled to struggle, your body dragged out, dumped)
9.
Are there nine only because after the ninth, time had run out?
That after the ninth, there was no more paint?
That silence fell on the tenth panel, a gray sheet,
that silence offers no discourse, only its end. It is
the conclusion of tyranny. God has turned away
long ago, that story is in the third panel’s
paint, where there was no time or space, only that what was there.
Perhaps, after the ninth panel the painter
was no longer sure that titanium white could belong alongside vermillion,
that the painter was no longer certain he would wake up
next to who he loved, next to the world outside his window,
the birds of dawn in Rome, in (what I imagine are cypress trees) singing at the break
of light, that he would wake as a painter, or human, or being.
Oncoming Front
like a cliff, falling
barometrics, sparrows in the dozens
Starlings in the Norwegian maple, a dozen
driven out: the happiness-birds, before the storm set in, a
hawk
has been here two days in a row
the hawk
dove into the boxwood
after a sparrow, the sparrow
flew through the bush to the other side
When does one become old? Another war, forecast, troops
on one border, others always on another
when your hands are full you are old
old crow in the horse chestnut talking to you, you think
pulling out a shiny coin
holding it in your empty hand, she (or he?) makes off with it
your hand more empty now
except for counting the wars the crow won’t touch
cold front, snow wrapping the west-side of trees
in a few hours roads will close
in the woods, a quick walk from here, dead wood caught
in upper branches sigh, limbs wind-rubbed
chapped
To be alive at the end of an empire here
is no different than
any other day, the clouds have lowered their curtains of snow across the lake
trellises X the white hillsides of vineyards, like concertina
wire stretched along the front
who will be starving a week or a month from now,
someone always does even if they go uncounted
as they do, always by the millions, some
will return, never to say a word of what was seen
sparrows, then starlings swarm the feeders
so little
time they say, so little to go round,
they burst into the air, gone
attending to the air’s carried shadow
Days ago a fox bounded across the road, I tell my dog
you missed it
she is snout deep in the snow something breathing below
warm as mud or fresh shit or a river egrets white as snow drift over
a fox I say a fox
Hands tied. Circles mark the spot bodies lie
Satellite photographs of
bodies left
Bodies are left as a sign of the state’s disregard
Bodies are left as a warning for anyone coming this way
Bodies are left for the crows
Bodies are left to taunt you to bury them
Bodies are left to disrupt memory, to be remembered only by the flies when spring arrives
Bodies are left before the cave of songs, to keep beauty from returning to the world
Bodies are left to be counted until the numbers are exhausted, to return to nothing, the starting
point, zero, O
God doesn’t need what you may give—
the snow didn’t stick, along the edge
of sidewalks mud, a fresh print of dog,
the day is already wasted, if you think about it
too long, but I won’t let you
answer, on the other side of all this, you
how many or only one, just you
and lovely, here you are, if here, listening
the snow a comforter we might have fallen into, had it stayed
through the long afternoon, into evening
after the swarm of starlings disappeared
into their own night’s enwrapping primaries
and secondaries, coverts, bluebirds, sparrows
packed away in the line of arborvitae
deer out of hunger or greed, the same
perhaps, have gnawed the lower branches
bare, wind has picked up, carrying
us with what little is left, across fields
waiting for wheat, the spindles of time’s fire
thin as glass stems stitching us
one to one, for the time being.