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Kathleen Fraser
from AD (notebooks)

"the fear of outliving one's own mind"
       --Kenneth Baker, on Willem de Kooning

notebook 5. "in spite of gradual deficits"

Through deep parabolas of air you swim up to her.
The room says "I'm a little bit out of this world" but

you are inside her when you paint
and you like the pink embankments of her shoulders

A certain muscular ditch is flawless between two points
You can find both sides of her later

She gives you her colors when you scrape her down and layer her
again with rose madder bleached by repetitions of white in the width of big

embankments, as if you thought of her
as a road to somewhere called dedication to light

°

Everything sifts through the painter's torso which is central
in spite of gradual deficits and paired helical filaments,

"like a plasterer laying thin coats of sparkling paste" incised
with charcoal  Turning, staring at nothing, the hand holds

the hard paint tube oozing fresh pigment, stretched & trimmed
Yet her swollen red passages in crystalline absence and array

Drawing from early numbed chatter trailing bright ridges
of silence  Or the lost year he tried to open her smearing apart

Again and again pour of turpentine, plaques and tangles
roughly proportional to loss

Kathleen Fraser's Selected Poems (1970­1995), il cuore : the heart, was recently published by Wesleyan University Press. She is currently finishing a book of personal poetics essays, Translating the Unspeakable, and makes her second home in Rome.

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