Charles D. Tarlton
Anselm Kiefer, The Sixth Trumpet: Ekphrasis
Noon you, wearish
the—woeing a blowgunner?—ash it rousing,
ease vista thick tube gliding. . .
—Paul Celan
When you’ve got plenty of Time, you become easily bored and restless, makes you want to run across the fields and under the storm; when there’s little left, you get frantic. Oh, where did the day go?
how it wants to be a landscape! But the distance grows oh, the cogency! the resemblance! An expectant sentence nearing fruition
it stumbles on an empty noun, the name of no one thing, but we can imagine say no! that's just fantasy!
dots and sunflower seeds posing as rain, locusts or uneven rows in plowed fields in a lunar landscape, mountains without names
could just as well be spilled paint, though, a solid mass make it THUNDER DUM-DE-DE-DUM, DE-DUM, your fingernails plow
through it, pushing (what is impasto to a poem?) over-richness, cumbrous, parturient, lumbering, something big, thick, and bulky.
A paragraph like an elephant, sentences wrapped around mountains, words as long as your arm. And a shadow, dark and orotund, fustian. Then something comes all atwitter, sparkly, bright, brushed milk and sand, thrown ink a sprayed way of splatter. Now, for some poetic-looking things, with ear-marks, curlicues to make you think of a poem, the shifting margin on the right,
like this:
Eggs worth winter sand, aloft when the leaves wondered,
or could be even this, like this,
Loco motives grumbling in a bridgèd tunnel (in the dark
Achaemenid friezes filled with humanimals rendered in spray paint) a lamentation
of swallows.
A Van Gogh landscape bled out something roughly raked.
Credits for painting: Die Sechste Posaune (1996) by Anselm Keifer. Emulsion, acrylic, shellac, and sunflower seeds on canvas, 204.75 x 220.50 inches, SFMOMA. Can be viewed at https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.105.A-C/.
About the Author
Charles D. Tarlton is a retired professor who lives and writes (now) in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter.