Erasure

Tonight, after reading the story of Rauschenberg’s erasure
of one of Willem de Kooning’s drawings— something

I would miss, the painter declared; something very hard
to erase
— I go out on the deck to snap another picture

of Venus and Jupiter coming closer together in the sky.
Intensely bright, two orbs outshining faint amber spilled

from street lamps obscured by leaves. What remains after
the marks are erased? Not nothing, say the physicists.

Not nothing, but poetry— says the artist. And I pause
for a moment, trying to look harder into the corridor

of darkness, knowing that everywhere I go, I have
no idea how much I am seeing. You, for instance, absent

from my side but now not so far away in the same
field of graphite: you could be anywhere. You could be

that outline scissored against the pines, a faint
stroke of orange blossom lofting above these fences.

You could be the sound of a shutter, the blank
accordion surface of blinds turned down for the night.

 

In response to Two Ways to Think about Nothing.

One Reply to “Erasure”

  1. Like this one, Luisa…

    Accordion surface. The jump from one erasure to others. (Oh, and I liked how you fused the (knitted) heart and Dave’s snakes in the next poem! Amusing.)

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