MARTIN ROCK

Notes After a Harlequin Apocalypse


"Certain people always say we should go back to nature. I notice they never say we should go forward to nature."
  -Mark Rothko


1950 White Center

You cannot stop painting landscapes,
and it seems that you are always drowning
or stuck between layers of earth.
In this future, there is a film
of crude oil on top of the ocean, and the beach
is cake icing or snow near to melting.
We are looking through a window
in the sun, which is everywhere and inadequate.
The body of your butterfly
is a urinal cake, with antennae and legs braided
to form a rope stretched across the belly.
Or is the black line what separates you
from the encroaching sky, and why again
is there blood on the brow of your golem?
The tongue is big enough for both of us.
There are a thousand places I'd rather be,
and I have left them all to be here.



1949 Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple

You have given your robot payot
and the mantle place is bleeding from its ears.
This fire is cleavage of two planets
aching to press into each other.
For now there is a splinter of peace between them
which is also a device to measure
the decibels when they crash.
There is nothing funny about a mustache
that won't grow in or a black line
when it splinters. We are the yellow planet,
and our window is a hole
in the tooth of your golem, who has grown
so large he must be put to sleep.
It is either a shadow or something heavy
is growing inside the earth.
Which of us shall write death on his forehead
in ash? There is nothing here that burns.


from Hunting the Wild Tengu

__________
    Gestation is difficult for the boy. He is ignorant to the sound of his own heart. When the body around him moves in the forest, he is unsettled as a mountain inside of her.
    An embryo terrified of Splitting. While the word abandon is unfair, he puts his mother through two miscarriages before growing comfortable with the idea of a body.
    In the end it is the village and its language that draws him from the womb. He yearns to learn the language of children, and walls.

__________

    When the time came for him to be pulled into the room it was morning. Mother on her back and the closest friends huddled in the midwife's house in the woods.
    There was also an A-frame cabin being built by the father, though it was unfinished and the wind and the heat and the animals could come in through the sides.
    Now, ghosts and people both are whispering in a semicircle around his mother. It is a good time to be naked and alone. The closest friends trickle away, like seawater.