The Agnes Martin Room

What is a question to someone who practices years of silence?

Stones skim the water’s surface, shimmer there, lost.

In the window sound of last year.

Swim dimmer there.

After four days without speaking, I don’t ask questions anymore.

Given a line, draw through space.

Reach to reason to region.     To seem or sum

Sun or stone.

Could weep here.

Sleep here.

In the sweep of watery gray.

On white, the wishes, the whispered accounts,

a little autobiography, littered on the surface.

Where we listen. Were we here.

Unaccountable dark matter of the universe,

an utterly supportless planet. Ocean of space.

All the same river to read. All shapes or landscape.

The scapegoat silent, following the road of devotion.

Going down without air.

Sounds like the rope against the side of the boat, a hollow bell.

Get subtler and subtler in the acres of water until

one refuses to return.

Spirit send the question sound.

Painting is the quicksand back.

Two tracks over the seeming field of white.

All the eventual answers are nothing.

Painting is asking you.

No time is passing.