They Tossed Him, the Portrait, from the Tallest of the Buildings

Yes, another, it's how I'm seething for now

• No thinking, please, we're red-baiting
• Covid-19, why sociopath overlords freaking out, watch the attacks on Sanders for attacking our sociopath overlords over Covid-19 be more vicious than his support for Castro sixteen light years ago
• Digital pint to the first of you who sends me a cracker pundit claiming Covid-19 an anti-Sanders sign sent by white old man in the sky
• Late capitalism
• The liberatory militancy of guillotine memes
• To stent confession
• Rise of Purple States
• Krasznahorkai interview. Baron Wenkheim's Homecoming my planned Spring Break in Michigan reading assignment
• Kim Gordon playing DC in July when we'll be in Acadia, damn, you'll have to not go without me
• New Throwing Muses
• Yo la Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-out is 20
• I mentioned Rufus Wainwright here few weeks ago, he's something new too
• New Magnetic Fields, hopefully real Magnetic Fields not 50 Songs Merritt album packaged as Magnetic Fields, this song doesn't rock me but at least Claudia's singing

THE PAINTER

John Ashbery

Sitting between the sea and the buildings

He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.

But just as children imagine a prayer

Is merely silence, he expected his subject

To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,

Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

                      

So there was never any paint on his canvas

Until the people who lived in the buildings

Put him to work: “Try using the brush

As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,

Something less angry and large, and more subject

To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”

                       

How could he explain to them his prayer

That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?

He chose his wife for a new subject,

Making her vast, like ruined buildings,

As if, forgetting itself, the portrait

Had expressed itself without a brush.

                          

Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush

In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:

“My soul, when I paint this next portrait

Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”

The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:

He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

                            

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!

Too exhausted even to lift his brush,

He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings

To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer

Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,

Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”

                       

Others declared it a self-portrait.

Finally all indications of a subject

Began to fade, leaving the canvas

Perfectly white. He put down the brush.

At once a howl, that was also a prayer,

Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

                             

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;

And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush

As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.