The Art of Navigation

          He set black and white on fire. 

          -- Harry Gaugh on Franz Kline

The rugged brushstroke of the dying oak 

 is left standing for a week, limbless 

as the marriage we find ourselves 

 dismantling. Without leaves 

or branches to create perspective, 

 trunk and sky, shape and space, equilibrate（平衡，相称） 

in the same plane, a balance of black 

 on white, white on black, 

like the sketch Franz Kline enlarged, 

 in 1949, on a Bell-Optican projector, 

crosscut of a junk-shop wooden rocker 

 he loved to paint as much as he loved 

and painted his wife Elizabeth, Elizabeth 

 already lost then in her dark refrain. 

When he saw himself in a book 

 she gave him -- Nijinsky as Petrouchka --

Franz painted that face to its grave. Over 

 and again he laid the dancer down, poor 

swallowed soul, cheeks pinched（压紧的，痛苦的） hollow, 

 bent head pinioned by harlequined 

hatband, lidless eyes eyeing nothing 

 but his own foreshortened depths. 

Years of tracing, retracing steps 

 until the facts of the matter distilled 

to stark architecture, passionately 

 unconcerned with finish --

Elizabeth, Elizabeth --

 the same dark refrain（叠句，副歌） --

But today the tree crew returns 

 to finish the job. One shimmies 

up rope to test what's solid or void, and log 

 the byproduct for winter. Now he shouts 

he's found monarchs, just a small clump 

 high on the bare trunk, resting up, 

absorbing the sun's heat: this time of year 

 they route their way by warmth --

Some paths depend on abstraction 

 (the blind foraging of sleeping backs 

until the spines meet, hinge into wings). 

 who knows how invisible lines 

line the visible better than an old 

 sight-gagged clown? So teach, you paint- 

and-pain-masked mime. I can't find my way 

 any other way. Teach me to read maps 

in the cadmium and singe-veined flakes 

 of monarchs brush-fired and dispersed 

on a breeze, in the tree that 

 with the lightest of gestures, 

like a finger touched against flesh, 

 the chainsaw opens, ring after ring. 

          -- in memory of Larry Levis