More Cy Twombly

Many of the poems in my recent book Haecceities directly take Twombly as their subject. Here are two stanzas from the poem called "Cede":

whiteness can one add to white but white course proffer at the skirt of cause

it was Twombly and wholly in some other reference to how a lake we know in common

yields the business of a mark by four pendulant inflections

a boxy vent as to air the swan its ebullient row of grace no more

nothing of the shaled discs, unfettered ware's ledgers of the rout, volumes of

yet dregs deterred in throes of vulgar matting so a sense serves mercy: unwelt

by its compass, proffered frame by which each prey to each each mouth to each to hand

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to be rendered sans stock of crux and wont, logged above the demos and the stage

like Pound on Mencius on Confucius, (later) Olson on Twombly

what whiteness can one add to white, what candor in the face of the ring of address

in Pisa say, for Twombly, the frame maintains its course of shape

the frame-abyss, Apollo in the woods, lake-red for sacrifice and use