POUR, TEAR, CARVE

Tesserae

By Katherine E. Young

—after Joan Mitchell’s August, Rue Daguerre, 1957

As good a starting place as any:
banked windows frame the setting sun
across a pond called “Paradise”
(in case there’s any doubt about
what Olmsted wanted us to see).
It’s far from home for me, too, Joan;
I never learned to skate or row,
although I staged my senior photo
beside that pond, faux veil of reeds.

I don’t know your Chicago, Joan, 
just the Art Institute and Poetry
(your mother was an editor,
once they ran a poem you wrote),
but every city speaks to me:
the pulse and thrum of postwar Paris
could just as well be Moscow, New York—
you leave your room in St. Mark’s Place,
turn the corner to Rue Daguerre.

Every city speaks to me:
bridges arc their longing across
the Seine, Chicago, or Moskva;
old factories cough their brickdust coughs,
while trains commence to swirl and loop
past derelict mews and tenements.
Pedestrians throng the boulevards,
sidestepping slops from butcher stalls, 
sidewalk cafes; come Sunday morning, 
the Lower East Side or Rive Gauche air 
will never not reek of Saturday night.

A city’s immortals are always 
dying: Lady Day, and Frank 
himself, honored now in sonnets,
and you—as Rosa Luxemburg—
in a mighty triptych in Quebec.
Which brings me back to Moscow, ochre 
swirl of brick and granite, where Lenin’s
embalmer passed his secret art
to his eldest son before arrest;
the son took over Lenin’s care.
I’m dizzy with association,
flotsam and jetsam, scattered fragments 
colliding and aligning, Joan,
as if we’d met once in Manhattan,
shared some point of intersection.

Joan, I’m writing from remembered 
landscape: Paris in the eighties, 
worn and scuffed, its edges frayed; 
Moscow marking time between 
show trials despoiling others’ treasures. 
Is this all we get, Joan: memories 
of frail and unpleasuring lovers, 
dogs walked along Rue Frémicourt, 
recitals at the Bolshoy zal
I fear I’ll never see again?
You say you try to paint the feeling
behind a line of poetry, Joan—
I’m roughing out this spindly line
in search of that exact, same thing.

So often it ends in gardens, Joan:
color, texture, the way light falls
across last summer’s stalks. Here dogs 
roam free. Birds swoop and curl like paint 
that taunts the canvas, blank, austere.
I lived sixty years, Joan, before 
I met a bluebird, in a garden
lately come into my keeping—
maybe the only thing that will 
outlast me. Though I dutifully 
apply patches resembling yours,
impasto flagrant imperfections 
that bubble from the bumptious, un-
regenerate page. Scrawl my name 
across the bottom. (Just in case.)

Katherine E. Young is the author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist) and the editor of Written in Arlington. She is the translator of work by numerous Russophone writers from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine; awards include the Granum Foundation Translation Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. She served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.