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A Discourse of Red

(After the painting, Inside my Dreams, by Carlos)

 

 

1

Confronted with emptiness

The artist fills it with red.

Or rather, creates space with it.

 

Confronted with abundance,

The poet calls it empty: the pallor

Of absence, or fear: the loss of color.

 

 

2

Where is she here, then, your love?

How conjure her by these lustful

Strokes of foliage, this brillance of brush?

 

 

3

The love of one’s youth leaves you

A widower early, before you can

Know the color of sunsets.

 

You pine for her now that you know

It is a scarlet sea streaked with white

Sails—maybe Batanes, Albay Gulf,

 

Brittany, it doesn’t matter.

Bolinao or Balearic. It is the brink

Where my dreams are moored.

 

 

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4

The poet imagines the lover for the artist:

Swirl of pigment, figment of tears,

Nameless heartbeat, passion’s fiction.

 

She lived here and left empty the yellow

Cottage: roof a sky of terra cotta tiles;

Beyond, branches of breadfruit,

 

Blue crown of birch, brown brow of star

Apple, to catch the deep light of evening:

All blue is red at the seething core of earth,

 

Purple the black hole at the center of whirling

Galaxies, the alternate universes of your exile—

Sunspots in the surge of solar prominences.

 

She looked, between the green storm

Windows, at the unkempt garden

With two wrought iron chairs (empty).

 

5

And the artist agrees, yes, she tended

The dama de noche and the nightshade

But left the bushes unattended.

 

She vanished like a ghost

In the invisible horizon—the vanishing

Point of the red dancers of Matisse, 

 

Braque’s heavy strokes before he split

His vision into surfaces, the solid

Planes of Edades’ grace.

 

 

6

And the poet calls him

as he signs his name, “Carlos”—

Whose heart throbs like the scarlet

 

Sunset because it is empty,

Or bursts with thick daubs of blood

Because it is in ecstasy.

 

 

April 4-8, 2013

(Parañaque; El Pescador, Bolinao, Pangasinan)

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