Jim Dine: The Flowering Sheets

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Panoramic view of a small region containing 100,000 stars inside the massive globular cluster Alpha Centauri (10-12 billion years old, 1000 light years from Earth, containing 10 million stars): image by NASA, ESA and Hubble SM4 ERO team, 2009

1.

I flew to Kyoto
I put oil together with pepper (a crime)
Don’t do it dear, the wedding / I insist you make woodcuts
I’ve not seen yr photo, yet I’m happy it’s there,
so Conte & Calvino will be on the ocean
with the boy who is busy, with a person who
has always had the worst moments /
in case it’s necessary, don’t exploit the friendship
on these wonderful pages, please
don’t believe there is no problem
only I cut the wood myself.
God’s wish and crying is easy before using colors,
spread the gloves with soap, not under the nails
like blue or yellow raw pigment mixed with Tokio and Kyoto
and my anguish to the point of realizing I abandoned my
children for texture and brooding.
Over the last decade,
my cerebral theme has been travel.
I spend my time performing biological preferences

Milky Way arching across panorama of Southern Sky above the Paranal platform of European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (moon rising, zodiacal light shining above it, Milky Way stretching across sky; visible to right and below the arc, Small and Large Magellanic Clouds): photo by ESO/H.H. Heyer, 2001; image by Maedin, 2010

2.

Because it creases so easily
they tore it down.
Jim only had a short while to achieve disorder amongst the paper.
A smaller format to push this time.
What’s the size of yourself what’s the
trap in the question what’s
the point of saying you can do it
if the hand can wipe us out so easily
and still accommodate the flood?
Philosophically, I grin / so had I!
Looking mystically skyward he regrets the possible
he tends to stay put because the aquatint gets dusted thru yr pants
as the rosin take to cotton like a flame.
The depths of the odd thing makes the toy typical
of my blooming drunk rose.
I deserve respect on the grounds, that at a bare minimum, the
veteran
who repeatedly turned a trick
is searching for a larger radiance.
My awesome power lies beneath the cuteness of geometry
the skeleton of time
reveals just how metaphysical a crossroad can be,
instead of foil.
There is an abstract career

360 degree panorama of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley at night. The Milky Way is visible as the arc in the center. A sailing stone is also seen below along with the tracks of other stones: photo by Dan Duriscoe for U.S. National Park Service, 2005

3.

The walker resurfaces to gain
the hammer of return.
Your awesome ghostliness
and your strength thru radioactivity makes the concrete title
help our intentions and moods.
The beautiful exchange of warfare and the rueful grimace,
made the order achieve itself before John called a halt to
villains.
Tear up the screams
I continue to beat with my thumbs /
my fear of what happens when art becomes a loose gulp.
I’m doing what I think I love.
A worker’s dilemma
A virtuoso performance for landscape.
I said it’s not possible. You can blow
them up as balloons, a true story
but I get vegetables and fruit and I drag them out
like condoms
for friends 

Panorama of a thunderstorm shelf cloud over the city of Wagga Wagga: photo by Bidgee, 2007

4.

Caught at the crossroad of psychology
Robert Creeley and Jim Dine regret the long time running /
we wish for connections at
the point of cipher,
near zero, ok?
“WOOF WOOF”
The increasing nuclear war between our toes, the petals of rain
on the hard crust of day old memories
here comes the pathos
the tears that make us stay with pure black.
Golem, the guest percussionist tonite.
Resurfaces in the ghost of Franz Kline.
Myself, I’m a firm member of American colonial power,
a long tradition
That will kill -- we already know this.
Confront our gossamer power
with identity as the main theme.
The Republic has removed me
from the photograph
I was the model in the window
all these years at the gate.
When did I, I ask in a drunken haze, 
begin old age instruction

 

Mount Carleton panorama: photo by andrew pmk, 2005

5.

All, in generally good condition
we are busy these days.
And at night we apologize and
say, please come to Paris again
please don’t be unfortunate
please get in touch soon like
last nite Demetrio called Sara
Recordati, have a Sambucco,
oil and pepper again, black
hair on yr upper lip
again.
For 2 years I’m in the bronze foundries casting and chasing
all the incidental paint strokes
accumulated like a pot on a stove
A long long time ago. I loved it /
A model of people and what’s in them thematically.
My Republic’s body
leaving behind a core of ironies
living in our youth --
A time of status quo / and fear of what you do to increase productivity. You inspire me to go against him.

Great White Lake, Mongolia: photo by Doron, 2000

6.

Typical of me and my impatience
growing more complex
to assert a less corporate view of the monkey in our sights
just above the taboo of ghetto feminism & pure saltwater swimming,
in a vehicle of lyricism,
other times in a state of flight
and the full significance of a free man posing as a gentile
for the safety of sticks and nuances of dark hearts & rope /
this physical dominance,
this new work fixated.
And mown like branches on the ground
rebellious like the sun, the ethos of a smile.
Colleges come forth and join the detachment of words from
ligaments
make homely shadows / introduce tools to each other
the clamp has always demanded
a primitive chord
to be sexual about.
Get personal and frolic
make drawings of muscle and salt.

Walloon Lake, northern Michigan, winter: photo by Moxfyre, 2008

7.

Wiser and with a far
wider variety of response
“A Famous Fall” every other year to cross this barrier
of modern truth and cosmic age,
hard to get over
to the other side of however you are now
while reading or hearing this and a
true self to be tried and touched with apologies.
(fragile swords)
A boy under pressure and --
us boy! Under the loser
with money to pay for the
phone call to Paris to treasure
the blunt / and coax a twisting line of faces demeaning
the effect of this war.
Overwhelmed by densely
compressed costumes at
their most fundamental
the society is but a corrupt
Pilate and I yawn along
with late friends who exemplify,
the fastidious

Thunderstorm with lightning (panorama photomontage): photo by Franz Mattuschka, 19 June 2009

8.

Frontier whiskey
come coax another twisting line /
on Yakima Street
I treasure the burnt and famous,
blowing apocalyptic lithographs
onto a, yet to be tasted, killing field.
Dear D,
I used to love cowboy movies
I always wanted to write immediately,
vis-a-vis the garlic, oil and pepper on the
“other” hand.
Sometimes whenever I’m
in Italy she reads a tale-a-night.
Europe and Asia don’t want to give up the cousins
again, 2 bodies
a penis entering a vagina

1. I need more information    
2. I need to be paid in kind    
3. Not like a farmer

but as an aphrodisiac. My sagging
neck calls to be airbrushed.
I may have the same passport
but I’m not entering the misunderstood
brotherhood of dreamers

The Rhône Glacier in Oberwald (Switzerland): photo by Ikiwaner, 28 July 2007

9.

Once brightly painted
I am a southern Italian singer and prophet
listing to the left of my companions /
lured by sailors dressed as singing beauties
seat the string player
despair at his open mouth along with
the beautiful hands of
the sirens.
My eastern way of dressing
seems to protect
a sense of the dead.
A mortal man
and murderer
standing on each of our outstretched arms
emoting the loss of childhood and trying to
become the promise
of life as a group of heroes.
Enraptured and drawn,
the voices of the women
gasp and murmur sacred mysteries about each other. We thought of you and --
           
“A child in winter sings” “A child in winter sings” 

Panoramic image of the Morteratsch glacier in the Bernina Range: photo by Daniel Schwen, 21 March 2006

10.

The Republic,
your newest work.
Evening
A fingerprint of stars rushing down the
Maximilianstrasse in negative,
handpainted as a cathartic root
to celebrate the blood in the third movement.
To translate is to compose atonally so --
I reach for my horn and
make concentric sounds,
visual clues used as a glaze to keep it solid and water tight. Do you agree to send some poems to a
person who has always been
lost?
A few good oxen, what a great idea!
I don’t believe we can wed before the weekend
I won’t be home till sunday.
I’m happy about the poems,
Let’s call them “KIDS AT SEA”
Is that clear?
....Does my exuberance give way to a style of itinerant living?
Ah well...
....It’s the end of the evening and we’ve not explored the minerals yet.

St Mary's Nature Reserve, near Hartley, Northumberland: photo by Christine Westerback, 2005

Mai Po Nature Reserve, near Yuen Long, Hong Kong (panorama view): photo by Baycrest, November 2006