from Drawing Water by Eva Heisler

BOMB 123 Spring 2013

Interviews

First Proof

Portofolio

Portfolio by Seton Smith

Plus

The Wick by Tom Neely

Apr 1, 2013

Super-Vault by Lee Lai

Take the horizon line, for example
a mirage—

that marks the limit of sight.

I spend much of my writing time seeking the horizon line. I know that there is no such line but I see the line when I look up from small blocks of text and squint at the sea. To write prose poems is to resist the horizon line—

to seek thick thin straight curved broken wavy lines among crumpled pages.

I work with little ink in my pen and hardly make a mark.

I shade squares while I wait
for the phone to ring. I draw boxes while
I listen to a lover
complain about his bowels. I draw
circles inside boxes. I divide
circles into quarters; I add
a circle to each quarter;
another square.
The patterns,
like the carpet pages of Irish monks,
mean to bewilder evil thoughts.

. This line is rational.

. This line is irrational.

The line break is hesitation or resistance or acquiescence
or a tiny rip in the mesh of a screen door.

Lines may multiply as cracks across the surface of an old painting
or lines may measure and slice like a butcher’s cleaver.

White synonyms.

K’s aberrant periods revoke transparency.

This must be done with a brush, but a brush,
soft at the point,
causes such uncertainty in the touch of an unpracticed hand
that it is not possible
to make a last dark certain
mark
.

memory:

kneeling beneath a table
trying
to cover the underside
with blue crayon

this was drawing was movement of the arm back
and forth across

pine boards / no sky
no star / arm / back blue / forth blue

The first broad aspect of a thing is that of color patch red like thyme red like thistle
red like nettle red like heather as a patch
of red flannel carries the first memory of
old smell

to make secret blue / to make a secret blue surface

memory:

late afternoon, September, the smell of chalk dust,
the smell of an overripe banana
and Sam popping gum in time to “Black Magic Woman”
I saw “negative space”
saw that triangle between the curve of a
hip and an arm
another triangle between spread legs
I drew the contours of an emptiness and a body emerged
the world was charged with negative space
mother’s
spatula-bearing body was an interruption in negative space
my sister, working the cherry pitter,
was a wheezing rupture in negative space
lying in bed,
the body was breach in negative space

Make black more precious than a rival’s crimson.

What I learned from Goya’s black—
to light anti-clerical candles against black walls.

What I learned from Manet’s black—
to scrape the mirror’s back.

What I learned from Matisse’s black—
to creep downstairs in the middle of the night and exchange blue silk for

black wool.

What I learned from Reinhardt’s black—
that the black is not black but yellow and sometimes purple.

What I learned from Dickinson’s black—

Eva Heisler is an American poet and art critic based near Heidelberg, Germany. Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic, a book of poems, is just out from Kore Press. Drawing Water, a long poem reflecting on the line in poetry and the visual arts, is forthcoming from Noctuary Press.

poetry

Super-Vault by Lee Lai

Originally published in

BOMB 123, Spring 2013

Featuring interviews with Verne Dawson and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Stanley Whitney, Katrín Sigurdardóttir, Federico León, Stan Allen, Rachel Kushner, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Coleen Fitzgibbon.

Read the issue

Like many writers, I feel centered when I write, or it might be better to say, when I don’t write, when I can’t write for whatever reason, I feel, frankly, de-stabilized. It’s dangerous for me not to write.

—

Sigrid Nunez