elenarivera — Three Fold

Eléna Rivera

The Divide

after Joan Mitchell’s The Bridge

1.

The way rapture is tinged
with a strip of paint, streaked—

I’d like to turn, tip
toward the second panel
cross the bridge, strip—

***

Chose to cover two canvases, not
one only it rips certain ideas of “art”
& still has to feed the body—

les couleurs / colors
   le pont / bridge
l’écoute / listening

Help me to continue with my wild abstract
   style; it’s a question of learning to listen.
Flat or round brush? French or English?
   How wide the gap? The artist chose hers.
   I was born into it—into the divide.

2.

The other panel has no beginning
begs to be drawn forward—
grief & joy poured out
of long blue & green tubes.

Then a bit of red & black
pours out of me without having
the right words. A breeze opened
the door. I wrote something I continued
right up to the edge and stood under eaves.
She squeezed me & it left a gap between
my right & left side,
scrape away now

red
reminder.

3.

Even if all parts rave & never match up
the painting ventures forth highlights both parts.
Let us touch and try, in the breeze the heart,
even if the parts part us in the worst of
ways, even if ...

& the emotion dragged over canvas
reminds me that I am alive—brushstrokes
come out of hiding hurrying to make
a choice that will clear the confusion
not trying to smooth it all out—
much more complicated all these cavities
(when they depend on bristles & handles)

4.

So I wrestled to bring the two sides together,
two languages, maybe even more insisted upon it.

Walking past the landscape that had been ripped
away from her, knew if she didn’t try she’d get sick.

Now hoped to obliterate the heartache stripped
of color revealing no connection between them.

The poem notes the vandalism that comes when
the perforation leaves her in palliative care.

Touche-moi touch me touche-moi touch me
très près very close & maybe we’ll quiet down

then, oh the brutality of it all, never understood
& still struggling to listen, find color, a bridge.

Pale Umbra

After Takesada Matsutani’s Cercle 96

There’s something happening on the surface
something that can’t live on a flat façade.
The canvas must bubble up, rise, spill out
to meet the eyes and blow air into cracks
of knowledge. I follow the lines in the canvas
& either descend into spaciousness or start
melting like the paint in all that white space.
The line runs ahead of me; can I meet it?
And after days of meeting it, a fear of landing
in it—I put on my shoes & see the crack open
where it bloats. Will I put my hand through?
Your motion becomes mine. Will you call me,
a petal and all its protuberances, its vertigo.
The gesture in the rectangle of roundness,
a pregnancy in the acrylic attuned to tension,
tearing at the surface where lines meet spillage
and protrusion—expand & enter the process—
where I ended up—in the vinyl adhesive.

An encounter in time with time, my response
to living with a painting, the material of it, thrill
of entering the unfamiliar—showing oneself
awaken in the process & seeing all the shadows.

Does Continually Mean ‘Stuck There’?

“cleaning is one way not to shatter scatter and scattering”
–Gertrude Stein

I hear the grumbling subway and started
to think that that was when parting took place

Part of me left behind, part of me moving
forward tossing seeds in the memory lake

There were disparate parts all abstract
going their own way eliminating something

Part and spread then clean up and the result
will probably be a diffused collection of color,

blue maybe (because I like it) or red, yes red
like the robin—I chose green for its optimism

Hurled into the wind there are things to face
head on hardness/narrowness also part of it

Who said there would be a cloak to hide
all this? There are always complications

but she didn’t like that word, “always”
implies “for all time” or “permanently” and

get stuck in that parting moment—come let’s
get back to an inner world with no boundaries

Fig. 1: Joan Mitchell, The Bridge, 1956. Oil on canvas, 45 3/4 x 70 3/8 inches (116.205 x 178.753 cm). © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Fig. 2: 松谷武判 Takesada Matsutani, Cercle 96-8-20, 1996 円. Japanese paper mounted on canvas, vinyl and graphite pencil, 46 x 35 inches (116 x 89 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Eléna Rivera is the author of several poetry collections, including Arrangements, with Peter Hughes (Aquifer Press, 2022), Epic Series (Shearsman Books, 2020), Scaffolding (Princeton University Press, 2017), and The Perforated Map (Shearsman Books, 2011). She received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation and was a recipient of poetry fellowships from MacDowell, Trelex Paris Poetry Residency, and the SHOEN Foundation. She currently lives in New York City.