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[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

Happening

Soho Saturday night. The Galerie Broome,
whose brutal decor litter, splinters, dirt
indicates the street's swept in through the door.
Ditto traffic noise the room is wired for.
Some scattered cartons, bricks, stumps, scrap lumber,
creosoted ties, stove-in sacks of plaster
assert a simple is-ness while subtly they
conduct the gallery-goer through their maze:
to this ill-lit, out-of-the-way corner, where,
life-size, a goggle-eyed, waxworks gent
some jovial, tuxed-up stagedoor Johnny
examines through a loupe from inches off
the cheek, lovely though averted, of one
who's turned away to regard in her mirror
herself in gray body stocking, raven hair
pulled back and ash-dusted Solange Mistral:
celebrity sculptress, here artist-performer.
On the stand nearby a strew of magnifiers,
and card instructing, Use, Please, and Return.

Catatonia, beautifully nuanced,
brilliantly wrought: catatonia
has found in Miss Mistral its poet.

Bourgeois rigidity.
Simple as that.

Lust's gaze, in reifying,
awards itself the blindness of the thing.

A Medusa for our time: mirror-besotted.

Even our narcissism cold-shoulders us.

Possibility is petrified as
this loveliest of monoliths.

It's all about Time geologic time
pent up inside our human hourglass.

The static drip of next-to-nothingness.
The glacier in the kitchen tap.
Can we bear this? Can we bear this?

Grain by grain, Galatea, homesick,
pauses in the portal of stone.

Less is more? At the very least:
aesthetics of anesthesia.

The artist is her medium.
The artist is her martyrdom.

Before it can decay to impatience,
then to panic madly dashing for the door,
she gathers the fresh sediments of our boredom,
compresses them to undivided terror.

I care no longer.
Say what you will.
Judged always
success, failure
each instant a trial,
the trial perpetual
my soul burned up
in your desire.
Bend close.
Lift the glass to your eye.
See my clay grow harder.


Irving Feldman
The Yale Review
Volume 91, Number 3
July 2003