a painting of an open book by philip guston

A PAINTING

a megalith, wounded or scarred with words or bullets or blinds

a black and white building : colours inverted

blinds drawn / or a thousand sightless eyes

pages carved from rock or from gold

full of imprisoned poetry, full of symbols,

black and bitter as coffee beans,

babel, except censored

all the peoples talk in morse code

no warmth, no huddling even

OF A BOOK

wooden book, nails hammered

words hewn from metal, not flesh

brittle, no blood, like punctuation, like potato snacks

or / PINNING THE BLANK PAGES OPEN like the wings of a rare specimen

addiction and perpetual death, prevention of present, of the turn of the page

the bulge of the previous leaf about to turn, should i go back to what was before

this the new page flat unfingered awaiting my giant outside eye, and my swollen finger, sticky

from my fat tongue I AM SALIVATING i have come down from the mountain i am holding this book up high above my head it weighs more than the golden calf, a little less than the cross

BY

the book is a coffin we nail open rather than shut and there's no burial no hole in the ground

a gravestone not a grave and like gravestones it appears to be sprouting out of the ground straight and tall

there is no hand no giant eye

its the book at the end of the world

it will grow fins in a moment

it will have to grow arms / legs

it could turn into a boot to stamp you with

to crush you

PHILIP GUSTON

or it will sprout a head and fly away

to spend its last day sniffing violets in a garden somewhere

it will pass into the golden sunlight, expiring gently on a tremoring leaf

yes thats it, I see a landscape prior to all this, I see two hills and a stream and I want to see, I keep looking for, an icecreamcone sun peering into the valley, another dumb face to greet me

(Timothy Taylor Gallery, February 2010)