Doodle

I draw a storyteller

who looks like Duchamp’s commode,

which looks like the Madonna

in the Stieglitz photo.

I set my storyteller

in a cut field by a shrine,

which began as a Pissarro

edging into a Cezanne.

Now my storyteller waits.

She knocks back a conical vase.

Tugging on my paper’s edge,

her immanence telling me, play.

Sow and Reap

If, under the Picasso, a student tried

to render the Jardin de Laberint

only to surrender all her forms,

and if, beneath a porringer upheld

between a bowing woman and a child

another figure, hidden, dwells,

what, in the end, was there concealed?

Mice gnaw at roots. Hermits scratch signs

into the ostracons, before they plow them home.

And where I whet my finger on this recto

words rolled like sown men that hail and rise.

Keen with witness, with eyes spinning

like obols, I cut them down for reaping.