Brian Teare
white pencil on etching and acquaint proof, twelve and a quarter by twelve and a quarter inches
—after a drawing by Agnes Martin
|| the grid’s a little calendar I put each minute into ||
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|| an elongated box grey with an e the color ||
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|| of the thinking preceding a divisive brighness ||
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|| the time before migraine or the thin needles ||
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|| the healer sinks in my head to release its heat ||
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|| let’s put this minute between the need to vomit ||
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|| and the history of metaphysics my hot mind ||
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|| cleared of its luminous fogs I polish each line ||
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|| of white pencil and think being ill makes me ||
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|| an object full of a process hard to see at work ||
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|| inside my body the lyric might be a plastic art ||
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|| after all if my voice also takes place as a shape ||
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|| arranged to stop the pain when I pin the grid ||
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|| with acupuncture needles the page clicks shut ||
We cannot understand everything that happens to everyone.
—Agnes Martin
days of headache my mind a loose
flushed hot skin weave stained by
thoughts it’s lost
illness keeps
a little calendar
the look of water
color on cotton so few memories
I return to these
colors as evidence
I’m writing it
by natural light
Any mistake in the scale and it doesn’t work out. It’s pretty hard because it’s such a small picture.
—Agnes Martin
the problem with illness
is I think there might be too much heat
a way to be ill that would in the spleen
free me from suffering general fatigue
the way correctly placed foggy vision
needles calm symptoms stomach spasms
during headache’s iterations in the old medical textbook
I begin to miss visual images each pressure point turns
though lyric is a woven grid metaphorical
hard stresses threading weft thought shelter
through the warp of stacked
lines the last stanza finished labor palace
I put my ear to its little box
dwelling bone
broken bowl
As grass that is hard to grasp cuts the hand itself.
—from The Dhammapada
for a long time I lie on my back
in the visual field
I lie on my back and think I can
loving questions think my way
because I think through pain
wind is a great comfort
I have no answers as if I knew
I have no choice no difference
I have to live life between pain
the teacher Agnes says
as I know it to be and thinking
led by my mind looking always
formed by mind for safe passage
religion is about this grass
that is also my body between them
A former NEA Fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of four critically acclaimed books—The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda Award-winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. His fifth book, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, will be out from Ahsahta in September 2015. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.