two poems
by Nash Keune
[Untitled]
This isn't beauty. No— No— Not at all—
I stand in front of the wall-wide canvas,
Without a frame, without any support,
Sheer black, dark red striations across it.
I walk slow along beside it, looking up:
Here it’s full red, here it’s all ashy black,
Here there’s red, but I sense dark beneath it,
Here there’s red, and a murk of indigo,
Here there is black and there is only black.
Much more than I can see at once or know.
It would be so small to say beautiful.
That, along the bottom: a new purple.
That, above: friscalating lines of red.
It’s not happiness, not delight I feel.
Not, still, a human awe at the sublime.
This immense span of simple color.
This work— it just happens to you, or not.
Words for Muzak, Perhaps
There’s a Rothko hung behind the front desk
On the entry floor, the unnumbered floor,
Just a hallway to the elevators.
A huge rectangle of mushed up blood red
Another thin black sideways one on top.
As wide as the wall, high as the ceiling.
I’d like to think that art always transcends.
I’d like to think that, even hung as
Mere decoration by some real estate
Speculator, chosen because it looked
Expensive enough, enough to impress
Prospective clients touring the building
(Even if only just subliminally),
It would still have its own rare magnitude.
But then: the bottom fourth of the painting
Is obscured by the two receptionists
Who are not provided— No: allowed, chairs.
Forced to stand all day, for just some reason.
The light comes through the glass walls of that floor
Through the left side in the morning, the right
At night, never just straight at the painting,
And all the harsh fluorescent lights are aimed
At various points about the ground floor,
So only patches of blood red and black
Are even really all that visible.
I’d like to think that, regardless of where
A piece is seen, it is still just the piece,
That art always creates its own context.
But no, not— this Rothko would be better
Viewed reproduced in a colored textbook.
I noticed it the first day I worked here.
But now it’s just become yet another
Bare, blank, unseen, accustomed nullity.
I guess that this is life in Manhattan.
You just become bored with more renowned
Surroundings than wherever else you’ve lived.
But, before, whenever I’ve seen any
Of Rothko’s paintings, these giant Orphic
Images, these overfull canvases,
They’ve made me sense so much more than I can
Actually see. Huge, raw, guttural,
Somehow much deeper than any realish,
Well-crafted one point perspective picture.
These purples, sometimes a glowing fuschia,
These reds, these whites, these dusky violets,
These startling oranges, luminous blues,
These onyx blacks, these matted, muted blacks,
In structured fields and in unbounded fields.
His paintings make me feel something immense
That I can’t name or know or comprehend—
Something vast, raging, sublime, surpassing.
And so, one Tuesday at 10:14,
I came in and proudly stood just right there,
Looking up at the painting, proudly late
To that week's editorial meeting.
This red, which deepens and lightens and swirls,
Here and here and there a thick impasto,
A tumulous billowing, a great churn.
But the black a jetty black, absolute;
No fading, no gaps, all of it the same;
It seems much bigger than it really is.
Standing there, looking up at it, I felt:
A balking; suddenly, sweat on my neck;
A weighing down firmly in my stomach.
I was trying to start to feel something,
In a too bright shoe-loud ground floor walkway,
By remembering how I'd felt before,
This wall-sized Rothko now just my prompt.
It's like trying to taste some dish again
That you can't have from now on because, say,
One ingredient has stopped being grown.
So you make something with the rest of it,
The other ingredients, which you eat
While thinking about how it used to taste.
I went past, quickly, looking ahead now,
Went into an open elevator,
In which someone had already pushed 5.
I stood just inside of the sliding door,
Now sweating out my back, my forehead too.
BIO: Nash Keune grew up in the suburbs of the suburbs of Washington, DC. Then he went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now he lives in Maryland and works in education.