Minor Details
It’s not these artists,
exactly, I worship—
Chagall hidden
in a blue flower,
Soutine in swirling
carcasses of beef—
but the binding
they self-fashioned:
in red, in black
and white, fastened
to a dream
as if through
a firehose.
I’ve reduced
each generation
before me
to the story it tells
about itself, of exile,
or digestion.
I’ve been skeptical
of trends, which
was trendy then. I’ve
been alone.
History claims
it doesn’t live
in its own shadow,
but I know I’ve cried
for a past
I don’t want.
Your opposite,
after all, is never really that,
but what you need
to be, which makes us sound
realistic. Comforted
by genre. Chagall
paid an old beggar
to wear his father’s tefillin,
couldn’t get his portrait right.
Three times
he tried—unorthodox
triptych—minor details
dissatisfied. Soutine stole
from his own home
to buy crayons.
Rain speaks, a laugh
of flowers, save
your proofs.
Let’s pretend
the obvious
gets created between us.
As if Soutine could capture
his crying out
when he was a boy
that stuck in his throat
when he painted,
or, failing that,
the happiness
that he had been an artist
all along.
Forgive every likeness
that augurs the mystic,
a spitting-image
angelic or grotesque:
I admit I’m obsessed
as much with those artists
as subjects they found
who were known
by parents, friends, relations
vast and unyielding.
I hesitate to think anyone
will know me as well
by worlds
I haven’t left behind.
And you? I say
to myself. And you?
I ask again. I’ll bind
my arm to art.
I’ll work myself in.
DON’T LOOK BACK
what I like about the wilderness
…the cut-up methods…
the wilderness as metaphor
repeated imagery, using collages, getting ten of the same magazine and cutting a
character out
what I like about the metaphor
or the exercise of making a collage and then cutting up the collage and then
making a collage from that collage and cutting that up, and making a collage from
that collage, you know?
his interview recorded, transcribed,
cut down, cut up, we’ve established
the basic facts,
the stopgaps: we’d worked together
before, a little
fragmentation, repetition…
but we can be in the wilderness
in the museum
we can leave the museum and find
in California the wilderness
is often inside us,
and when we come back
to the museum,
no longer wearing suit and tie,
no longer dressing for the job
we want, in metaphor
as wilderness,
we take shape around
that { }cut up
. { }cut down
inside us
fragmentation, repetition…
a metaphor is a good place
for the poet to hide,
I write about other people
and I admire that London
wants to make a name for himself,
as we are not nouns but verbs
are we not?
and what does that say
about the Gods
and the favors they grant?
fragmentation, repetition…
is that a technique
or a life lesson?
my wilderness a desert,
cinematic, cut down,
cut up, commissioning
thoughts I thought
I knew what to think,
what I really thought,
virtual, unreal, the desert
has time, waits to see
what we’ve established,
the basic facts, the desert
has that, the { }originals,
. { }original’s
a different and more
profound work inside us
it’s also informed my understanding of the world
it’s very interesting for an artistic practice
to think of things in those terms
the desert makes some claims
we take them with a grain
of sand
what should have taken days
at most takes years of course,
against the grain
JOSHUA GOTTLIEB-MILLER received his PhD and MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he also served as Digital Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. His debut collection, The Art of Bagging, won Conduit’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize, and his second book, Dybbuk Americana, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Joshua teaches at San Jacinto College and lives in Houston with his wife and son.
