Miller - Watch

Watch

One

The driver tells me of his town near Spain, north of Toulouse,
where Louis Treize
tried to kill all the Protestants, where the former president of the
Spanish Republic
was buried during the civil war because he could find no peace at
home. (Aragon

and Picasso fled to France, as well, Aragon leaving his mother
speech to sing
the nightingales slaughter.) The town still bears the scars of the
Kings bombardments.
We climb higher and higher. I think of Daourts paintings, of the
blue openings

that appear so often in them. The labyrinth of scaffolding in one,
workmen
transfixed in the middle of their labor, and in lonely apartments
across the way
a woman hidden in impossible contortions, and everywhere sad,
magisterial cats

looking at us questioningly. Even in her studio, the crossing lines of
light and shadow,
despite her large, open work space, feels like a spider web of work,
the rectangular
blue above and the light caught in a high windowglimpses of
transcendence.

During the occupation, Daourt was protected in the house of the
Comtesse in Marseille,
but after liberation, her mind grew worse until she began to dress in
newspapers
and beg in the streets. I climb another hill in Nice to the Chagall
Museum

where a young Japanese artist asks me (I dont know why) the
significance
of the arc-en-ciel and whether theres a biblical story. I say that
God destroyed
the world in a flood yet promises never to flood the world again. It
means hope.

In the next room, I stand before LExode. Christ hangs in the cross
high in the center
but a flood of people moves up and to the left through fire, a blue
woman suckling
her child, hopelessly, buildings falling in fire, an artist, head turned
unnaturally

backward from the window, framed by the cross in the glass (no,
this is another
painting Im remembering), a spectral virgin floating toward death,
a mother and child
born into a sea of floating, drowning faces, and the Christ glowing
in a white nimbus,

his face dark in contrast. I look back and forth from the slaughter (a
child put down
on the ground by his mother beside a little billy goat looking up to
the hand stroking it.)
Christs right eye is gouged, I think. Then, no: If thy right eye offend
thee,

pluck it out.

On the sarcophagus, white waves, chiseled grain
in wind at an angle, a brass buckle,
an iridescent vial;
tumuli, circles in a circle;
an iron age granary;
a Roman road.
I imagine angles, eyes, who made whats made,
hands holding stone, bronze, or iron,
or flesh and bone alone, clutches of people,
transfiguring spirits and tongues,
what I speak, eat, and feel made up of bits of them
so grains good, birth first, and the fresh fruit sweet:
it isnt their ends anymore than them I meet.

I no longer want to go fishing.
I dont even want to play
In the water. The boat
Here has no oars, the current
Is too swift. In the dark, teenagers
Discover their body together.

The body feels like a prison.
I kneel by my fathers stapled body.
He suctions thick liquid from his lungs.
He coughs to clear them; it hurts.
He wants more air. He wants
To live, the hearts valves parachutes

Opening with oxygen to feed
The bodys healing. A tube
Empties the chest cavity. He excretes
Liquids and poisons.
His shocked kidneys come to life.
His stunned heart beats. His lung

Opens again. He eats. He poops.
He walks. He wants to go home.
On the phone, I catch my sister
Taking him home. Its snowing.
Its cold. My brother and mother
Help him climb the stairs.

I walk down the path
By the shallow canal. I see
A falcon fishing. The power plant
Breathes steam. I hope
The wind wont singe me.
I come to the falls

Where a little dog