1.
driving anywhere in traffic I tend to spend the standstill
conjuring a whole valley of extravagant remembrance
conjuring the contra scent of petrichor for a parched planet
low rumble under the Helmholtz Octave Designation System
earlier under d’Arezzo the gamut is gamut an example
of synecdoche is conjuring rain running rampantly mint
in a weed filled field conjuring billboards of paintings
depicting what was there before the Anthropocene
although dear painting itself appears to require the presence of us
already I have a problem with analogy elation invention and grief
as I’m recollecting my emotion on seeing a single van Gogh
displayed like a billboard at the Frick standing there stricken
no mediation but the painting between
his trembling hand our inconsolable eyes
2.
emotion from Latin emovere “to move out“
even before van Gogh & Cezanne & so forth
people moved outside as we do
to meditate and mediate nature
late in the eighteenth century late in summer
late in the bosky afternoon burgeoning
bourgeois urban humans not even artists
or tourists would take from their pocket
an optic shade of Claude glass to survey their
sunset gardens in its darkly mirrored gaze as if
a century earlier in a less degraded Arcadia
they’d been strolling an imagined landscape
painted by Claude Lorrain darkening portrait
of a pastoral already disappearing world
Cover art: Topography by Ian Wells
