Giornata: Cy Twombly's Green Paintings (I-VI), by Charles Tarleton

View Untitled One through Six (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986 at 2.06. These are the works that inspired this sequence of poems.


Giornata:  Cy Twombly's Green Paintings (I-VI)
 
I never really separated painting and literature.
Cy Twombly
     
But here is a painter who has a poetic sensibility....
Octavio Paz
 
I
 
after Untitled 1 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700460
 
Green acrylic slathered on, and two quick smears
of white piled heavy at the top and fingered
downwards, thinning as it goes through the green
and onto the frame.
                                     It’s no silver cataract
in a verdant jungle somewhere, no sucking 
Charybdis loose in the gallery; it doesn’t
mean anything.
                             It just stands there on the wall.
Brush strokes show through, and the long lines of drip,
and the little places where the paint runs onto
the bottom frame.
                                  You can feel it reaching
for blood connection, seeking out its own kind.    
  
II
 
after Untitled 2 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700462

He’d stepped away from the first green painting,
prepared another, a darker green and a thicker one,
and mixed white into the still wet background
to make a paler patch.
                                           We will need different
words, I think, to circumscribe this bigger glob
coming down from the upper right, its tiny
white fixtures fastened to the upper frame.
It’s not enough, you know, just describing
things in general, like the shapes the white paint twists
itself into, or the stringy pale drippings 
racing down to the green-drizzled bottom frame.
 
III
 
after Untitled 3 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700463

A rainstorm coming slowly off the Rockies, 
or jellyfish drifting in green water,  
                                                    Klecksographien
cloud faces of a dream world.
                                                      Iridescent 
white is thicker now, its dripping more profuse.
Did he pause right there to watch the rivulets 
run down, or was he already thinking 
back to the first painting (or ahead to the next
bare plywood) making those adjustments that were 
piling up now in his mind?
                                                 A circus tumbler
doing a three-ball cascade twirls at his work,
with the phosphorescent rains descending.
  
IV
 
after Untitled 4 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700464

It’s the weight of the white thing now, pulling it
down, while a green current dissipates pieces of it 
being broken off.
                                The green is a dark river,
say, or la mar profondo, and the white electric
angler-fish swim through misted trails of light
(and still the paint runs down onto the margins).
Clouds, soap bubbles, misted mirrors, white dung
thrown at a wall, things that can’t hang on for long.
When the green sea reflects itself, the layers
spell depth or distance, receding shadows
wave in the ebb and flow like laminaria. 
 
V
 
after Untitled 5 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700465

Look there!  That’s one of the places where he spread
the paint with his fingers. See how it swirls,
like a de Kooning! 
                                 It’s twisting in ribbons of paint.
You sense Twombly’s presence now,  the random daubings
of thick white paint, spread on and then pushed along
(it’s said) with a stick, dragged to the porous bottom,
all the way to the frame.
                                            It’s in motion!
The drip marks on the frame? They’re like threads
stitching the green waters, like guy wires
running to stakes driven into the wall.
And still it waves and quivers and wiggles. 

VI
 
after Untitled 6 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700466

Pyrotechnique! Feu d'artifice! O Apogee!
Come at last to the very last, and turn around, 
do-se-do and a right left grand! 
                                                          Promenade!
These green things go in a line, he’s running up 
and down, scratching adjustments here and there 
until we grasp him in these green crescendos, 
rising and falling in his lissome turns, nearly
filling up the picture.
                                       When the rockets blow
white! O White streaks! When the rockets blow silver
into a star and it rains down onto the frame.
The artist takes it all in, striding up and down. 
 
Charles Tarlton
 
Charles Tarlton is a poet living in Old Saybrook, Connecticut with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter, and their two standard poodles, Nikki and Jesse. His poemd have appeared in 84 journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold,  MacQueen’s Quinterly (ands KYSO Flash), Ilanot Review (Israel), London Grip (UK), The Journal (UK), Innisfree Poetry Journal (Eire). In addition, he has published seven print collections and four chapbooks of his poetry and ekphrasis.