Climate Study

The painters are busy working refuse

to "interrogate" canvases—mining 

the snow forts of autobiography—

eschewing transformation, transcendence 

for obliteration or another 

pair of hands, a handless system. Busy 

as the poets are busy, exploring 

drawing to console their mute detachment. 

They wander aimlessly. Each of them lacking 

a guiding principle—faith. They produce 

images of nothing as in the style 

of images of nothing. The style gleaned 

from seminars and the icy modern 

parlors of their childhood. Yet sometimes 

a proper nothing, borne of incident,

collision, or loss, graces their crowded 

studio, not as an earned victory

of rigorous practice, but as a gift 

from the one Nameless Large. One sees the gift 

at evening openings, amid the new 

works in bronze or stone commanding the cold 

blue light of the gallery, its polished 

concrete floors, one thinks they sense the presence

of an old presence. Hoping to confirm 

this suspicion, they ask the spectator 

nearby, in hushed, precise tones, to not scare

the room’s accumulating sanctity,

like a sleeping child, “Quite a departure 

from earlier work, don’t you think?” glancing

around between forms like the lover does,

withdrawing into air above a bed, 

the fresh hollow carved around the body, 

suddenly shy, strange to themselves, nude, and 

the other viewer glances too, soughing 

exhausted breath without words or tension.   

The two laugh like two people looking back 

at the escaped collapsing building, 

all their possessions and projects inside. 

It's not a new camera, they know, the thing

in bronze or stone, but it seems to condense 

history with visions of the future, 

with one individual life like theirs—

all indecision and experience,

all the libraries, lectures, insights, notes, 

all earnestness and all cynicism—

into a singular, flawless understanding 

that vanishes upon their exit.