(for David Malouf)
The conception is everything – grown
from a hostile mind like a city state
in a hot wilderness. Its curve and arc.
Two men in the beginning performed
a simple act – welding two girders
together, then a third. A whole complex
of space – Uffizi-garish, little
Medicis volumising over it …
The procession of rooms – the glopping
monitors’ hum and buzz. Some primitive
Giotto’s Last Supper – jungle-eyed,
a caged figure mewling at its captors,
hook, tail, breast-mound and rude totemic line
(“tantôt libre, tantôt rechercher”) –
the miraculous Daughter of Fishes,
fleshlipped, nightblue, shriving the horse-mackerel.
“Still glides the stream and shall forever glide.”
Five thousand miles of platitude and not
one pale god to be seen. Nolan’s Burke, dead-
eyed like some homicidal idiot,
stands sentry at the tomb of the unknown
artist – bark and red ochre, yellow,
white, a pair of sticks tied with possum gut
to steer through subterranean weather.
Whoever said that art doesn’t conform
to fact? A polaroid nude, the eye’s un-
bridled rut blacking-out a big money
sunset, navy yards and warm chardonnay.
Or an artefact shaped from the stolen
inner lives of appearances. These things
like maps of impending extinction: that
procure such insurance against themselves.