A Blocked Pollock Hallucinates O'Keeffe Near a Monterey Lighthouse:
November, 1955

"The long, bitter marriage of Jackson Pollock
and Lee Krasner made ever-more-complicated
by Pollock's self-professed maniacal tendencies and
inability to consider new directions for his work."
-Anonymous

Hush now. You're not a baby
but my skinny little love.
Hunched in a peacoat, that strange concoction
of red wool and mohair, I watch you, Lee,
leave the restaurant while I fumble red-knuckled,
sweating, through my last tattered stash of cash,
watch you find the most pleasurable spot
to crouch over the rocks, observe--
almost as if I'd died or you'd two-timed me
for some lady-limp abstraction of your own, relieved
to dump the has-been sot in a corner
where he'd rot to yellow bone, scraps of ash.
Whatever vision you spin out of gold light and Chablis,
a woman who breaks open easily
as a splintering wine cask when I enter her,
all the strain of dailiness renders you fragile
till your fragility becomes a blessing
and we celebrate, together, that rough
splitting-apart of the flesh which is sex.
Even if I'm drunk, you appear more girlish
than I remember
though most memories seem lavish as scotch
when I trace your knife-hipped body in bed, the blunt
warm breasts I love to bite
until the red aureoles, the nipples erect,
startle like the Holy Ghost.


                                 So, a saint
locked into sensations--if saintliness connotes loving
passionately, lasciviously, deliciously,
as Bernadette of Lourdes courted her Idol of the Rocks--
you huddle in your peacoat that leaves
your thighs in their short blue dress exposed,
goosepimples dappling that arc of white skin
till you turn, flushed with a sudden chill.
"Talk to me, Lee!" I shout: shrugging, you look away
at fog withering beyond the horizon,
exhortations vanishing
in a tumble of wind wild, pungent
as any weed flying off in that rank cold
blast of spray. Your eyes, before you glanced away,
flashed images of flat gray rocks
and sea lions sleek and buttery as oil,
of waves sliding higher until
their opacity threatens to obliterate us both
with that cool white stink of breath
that might even be God's, if we were Romantic enough
to say.


                                 But, though you saw nothing, maybe,
still dreaming about the studio, my nakedness under that paling
natural light compelling you to grab my waist,
climb my lap surrounded by cigarette wrappers,
butcher paper, canvases in the process
of being stretched, making you crazed to straddle me
one last time
though glancing into your eyes made my sudden loss
palpable: "You're a drunk," you whispered, "a fucking
fucking drunk who can't even get it up"--
though you saw nothing except sea lions sprawling black
but light-dappled as Rembrandts
with inertia, with regret,
all my life's been working itself toward
one vision: the studio models starved, essentially thighless
shrugging themselves into the rags
of floating translucent robes, the gray cold air seeping
into bones that seem to rot under the pressure
of mealless, sleepless nights
when I contemplate the turkey baster,
the drip-brush sealed into the stiffness of caked black paint,
Where to go, where to go
straining against my cranium,
the how's of pushing myself away from a body
of dead paintings toppled there supine like a whore
too tired, anymore, to keep her slack legs
closed--and that's when I first thought of her,
let my obsessions slip, drip, slide
away from choreography, away from too-deft camera angles
and feinting booted feet
to worry, again, about paintings, about where to fix
the exact gold flower that arced away from
the meadow-wash of yellow
in my first nonabstract work in--fuck--twenty years?
And when she appears--"Holy shit," I murmur,
as if I hadn't been expecting her,
as if the beer, wine, bourbon, scotch
hadn't promised her,
as if, mumbling, sweating like the crumbling sot I am
in a ripped black t-shirt silly enough
to keep striking poses in,
randy enough for the piglike exertions
of sweaty pleasure you used to long for,
as if, as if I didn't need you
though you quickly, Lee, avert your gaze--
and when she appears, Mother of God, no fucking mistake about it,
eyeing me fumbling for a smoke
from the Marlboro's pack tucked into my sleeve,
my fingers reeking of Red #5, of Yellow Titanium,
her stark weathered face tanned from decades of sun
wizening everything down to her knuckles' roughened skin,
that nutbrown face flushing red in gusts of water, wind, discovery
as she crouches, clutching the railing of a lighthouse
condemned twenty years ago--though I love you, Lee, I do,
I require no confirmation for this moment my entire life's
gone spinning toward in an ecstasy of mauves, violets, olives,
and the rotting-flesh stench of turpentine: it's what
we've made out of each other in bed, what the fumblings,
yearnings, bone-splitting thrustings
have evolved toward after time, custom, patience, love--
you, my wife, slack-chested, little-hipped
on an arc of dark gray rocks
but beautiful in your familiarity,
what some might call the pedestrian,
and the magnificence I crave
haunting a dead and abandoned lighthouse
with not even a paintbrush in her palsied wavering hand,
the woman I envision as O'Keeffe,
the lusciousness I called Reality.

####

Terri Brown-Davidson's poetry and fiction have appeared in more than 650 journals, including TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and Hayden's Ferry Review. She was one of the featured poets in the anthology TriQuarterly New Writers (1996). She has received 35 national writing awards, scholarships, or fellowships, including the AWP Intro Award and a Yaddo residency fellowship. She holds the M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. in English and creative writing.

She can be reached at: tbd@idavidson.com.

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