I was there in a room in a building in a city
Two poems about seeing
Adam Judah Krasnoff’s poem in Issue Seventeen, about a hilltop and its vista, is titled “Encounter.” That would also make a plausible title for Andy Butter’s poem about the relationship “between viewer and painting,” but it is instead called “A Severe Face Angle Makes the Shadows Clear.” Both Krasnoff and Butter reflect on all that seeing can do to us, and all that it can’t do for us.
ADAM JUDAH KRASNOFF
Two stones at rest at the summit of a hill.
Two stones at rest at the summit of a hill
Atop which we too are seated, resting.
We two at the summit of a hill, seated atop
A pair of immovable stones, whose rest
Is permanent. This is the summit of feeling,
I do not say, you do not say, we do not say,
But rather point out facts about surrounding
Hills, on which we will never sit, not in all
Likelihood. Two members of a race of
Hill-cresters, patient onlookers, silent yet
Officious prospectors of open space,
Rock-noters, tree-noters, bird-noters,
Forecasters of a weather internal, we
Are careful not to speak of what we cannot
From this vantage distinguish, of images
Discrete and therefore ever-vanishing,
Ever-feathered by wind and mocking rain
Falling upon a landscape irreal and therefore
Unpuddled, falling upon the brow of our
Hill soundlessly, upon our two summit-stones.
Better to speak of things solid and therefore
Uninterpreted, better not to infract on solid
Silence, only look and in looking unfurl,
Give up on meager provenance, on walks
Through pine forests or on grassy tracks,
On afternoons when through a chink of
Wood or vale of fog there would appear
A hill, solitary, in the center of our sight,
And at the summit of that hill two stones
At rest. Better not to have seen that which,
Once climbed, would unseam us, would seem
To radiate and in its radiating offer nothing
But its sight, of which we were never sure
Though sure that we would never tire.
A Severe Face Angle Makes the Shadows Clear | Poetry
ANDY BUTTER
A new study made no claims on discovering
anything of value, it was only an extension
of every other study’s conclusions: if we’ve found
abandoned cities under the rainforest’s canopy
using LIDAR let’s assume from here on out
there will be a great deal more buried
in the Earth’s crust. A pocket
of parasites squeezed out of a sheep’s skin.
Here’s everything I know about everything
we don’t know: extreme one-to-oneness
between viewer and painting is rare.
A music unfolds invisibly between the two.
Big swatch of bright orange and that dark blue…
Since I saw my first Rothko
I hear it bleating from the museum wall
like a radio beacon no matter where I’ve traveled.
I remember the paint daubs rising like ancient temples.
I was there in a room in a building in a city
of strangers weeping. I was in love!
And decided to dedicate
myself to enacting that futility.
I loved the way Adam's poem took the reader up the hill into a newly gained perspective of seeing and yet being at rest. Thank you for sharing his work.