Collaboration with Charles D. Tarlton and Ann Knickerbocker

Stereoptical Study IV: For Susan Howe, by Ann Knickerbocker. Contemporary.

Stereoptical Study #4, Black and White
 
   They were laden with franklins and lindenshields gleaming,
   with Westland spearshafts and with Welsh broadswords.
   The berserkers bellowed as the battle opened,
   the wolf-coats shrieked loud and shook their weapons.
                                             - Thòhorbiorn  Hornklofi
 
1
 
Black ghostly figures painted on a gray stone wall, in a chalk cave somewhere in the desert or the mountains.  Misty figures wrapped in dark shawls or blankets coming to a ritual based in strange machinery, coming out of the stone, coming toward us.  Or, I’m imagining snow now, an ice crevasse uncovered, and these are figures frozen in the ice, ancient Viking remains, wrapped in sealskin, propped up against the rocks.  Look, where the painter has drawn a long red line with a straight edge, dividing the two interpretations.
 
smutty images
black ereksjon white cuños
but it’s the background
that confuses you, the white
on black on white, all colors
 
present in white
every light can be reflected
and then in the black
every color in the spectrum
now absorbed, we cannot see
 
it could be someone
emerging from city fog
or wrapping themselves
in mists rolling off the bay
they come hither, they go back
 
 
2
 
The truth is you cannot say just what these images are images of; in part they resemble things in our experience but mostly not, mostly they are inventions.  And what are we supposed to do with that?  An artist takes a brush and makes a bowl of green pears on a canvas; now all we have to do is see if they resemble pears, as we have known them (or seen them made by other painters).  Then, another artist, takes the same brush loaded with the same green paint and lets an image emerge from the effort to sing an emotion with this brush, this color paint, and this figure. So, now, what are these images the picture of?
 
each brush load of paint
has a beginning and end
where the paint pushes
hard and heavy a broad line
lighter, thin and feathery
 
the paint is never
something else, never a lake
never a hay wain
a viewer or maker viewing
 
assembles the view
ties a hair’s width of yellow
to an underleaf
like deciphering a code
scumbling a line of which clouds
 
 
3
 
I was questioning why I knew of no white shadows, no black lanterns to make pale silhouettes on the dark walls.  The world could have been that way (in some places it may well be that way), the blackness sucking everything into it, absorbing everything.  Darkness then might radiate, in turn, in images projected in differences of temperature, the heat at an invisible end of the spectrum burning white-hot roses, boiling skies.  See the shadows cut out of black paper, shine the light right through.  What about black and white clouds?
 
its complexity
is all in the lower right
unfamiliar shapes
uniqueness in a world sui
generis, nothing familiar
 
looking carefully
down through the white painted mists
there’s another world
trying to show through, eager
to be kept in the picture
 
like everything else
the world being portrayed here
is layered. You see
what can seen from where you are
maybe a bolt of lightning?

Charles D. Tarlton

Charles D. Tarlton has been writing ekphrastic tanka prose for sometime, publishing several in Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, Atlas Poetica, Skylark, and KYSO Flash, Review Americana, Inner Art Journal, Prune Juice, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold, Undertow Tanka Review, and Fiction International.

Ann Knickerbocker is an abstract painter who has shown her work in New England, the West Coast and overseas; she has been a member of several galleries in Amherst, MA, Essex, CT., Guilford, CT, and Gallery Route One, in Point Reyes Station, California.  Ann chose the paintings for the project from her ongoing work (all of which, along with her resume, can be seen online at: Annknickerbocker.com.).