Caley O’Dwyer
Credit photographer: Audrey Mandelbaum
(USA)
Dark Greens on Blue with Green Band
after Mark Rothko
The world begins again,
blue antecedent to an as yet
unformed idea.
Space without land, without
lines of constant course,
before time and the names
for names, when no vessel
angled on true north,
and there was only
time as possible,
the might be world
preparing to be lived.
A closet that is too small to open
from the inside
opens out and
birds become birds.
Distance
becomes God. The voice wakens
and you are to yourself
a stranger. This is
the first part of making
a world, any world
each time it aches
into being. As with
history at large,
everything is claimed
but the area beyond
a narrow inlet
where what will happen
has not been struck,
can’t be foreseen.
[“Dark Greens on Blue with Green Band,” p. 2, continued, new stanza]
You travel there by boat
through a narrow crag
where the serpent
waits in the mouth of the cove,
the stormy petrel soaring
over the crashing ocean
and there is for a time
only rain and tenuous hope
an almost sure loss of life
that if you can bear it
leads to a kind of start,
and if you’re good you know
any start will do, any
little sounding, so go
into the cove
to find a piece
of what you have, dredge it out,
wet and unsightly,
put it with the others
if you can ever find them
in your life
so together they might make
a map of sound,
words you can live by.
Slate Blue on Brown and Plum
after Mark Rothko
You were permeable,
impermanent,
a coolness like truth
with branching tributaries
into rage. It wasn’t possible
at first to love
being least,
but you lasted.
You let down your hair
and followed the marsh
where the harrier toured
with blazing eyes
the flowering rush, great
estuaries to the sea.
You saw yourself in summer’s
splenetic heat, and in the trees
rattling green when evening
banked against the lush auroras.
Shimmering particles
unhinged the bending light,
parts of you
no one could destroy.
You lived to break
where life was breaking,
like water crashing
over a damn, this
force in the calling.
[“Slate Blue on Brown and Plum,” p. 2, continued, new stanza]
But grief knew
your openings. To grief,
you were a permeable mass.
Everything gone
rang as it faded.
Grief stepped into you.
It made you wander
homesick in the music, unsure
who to become.
Too much
to love, too little time to do it,
vicissitude was your nature,
or what you did,
back and forth
between hope and dread.
Then the rain woke
the street and the dream scattered.
You were wholly alive.
From your portion
of the mystery you listened.
The sound was rain
and cold,
then a gradual warming.
Smitten with Earth’s
willful charm,
you ran to the sea
with an appetite so grand
[“Slate Blue on Brown and Plum,” p. 3, continued, new stanza]
it ached like the afterlife
of a bee’s poison, the throbbing limb,
chiming in the throbbing, the bells
inside the bells of wanting.
You were free. You loved
everything that lived.
Rust and Blue
After Mark Rothko
In the meantime are the names—
blue windows through which we see the world
through cloud cover, sea mist, Atlantic rains.
We get by, getting it right, missing
what’s forming there beyond
what we can explain.
I hear silence in sea grasses,
the eel curving its low vowel in a dark opening.
Everything we know is senses,
each name coloring the thing it means.
But we say what we see, even if we are
too small to hold it, even if
we create everything we know.
It takes all to make the world not strange.
It is from within this wandering vessel
that I love the light house, it’s bright hope
beaming, guiding us in, while sea birds
are soaring, drifting out of range.
(from my in-progress book on Mark Rothko paintings, Light, Earth and Blue)
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BIO
Caley O’Dwyer is a poet, visual artist, and teacher living in Los Angeles. He teaches creative writing and psychology at Antioch University and was previously an Associate Professor in University of Southern California’s Writing Program. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Warwick Review, Curator Magazine, Ekphrasis, Washington Square, and other venues, including the Tate Modern Museum in London. He is a winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and a recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer grant for poetry. His first book, Full Nova, was published by Orchises Press, and his in progress collections, Light, Earth and Blue and American Proverb feature, respectively, poems written in response to the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko and poems that find in contemporary American culture cause for both terror and humor. Caley lives at the Brewery Arts Complex in downtown Los Angeles.