As/Is







3.08.2017


Something Solid: The Nineties: Defiance

 

I see her occupy the back of a motorbike: complicit
in the destruction of established orders, expressive
of the willful imposition of the defiant on any
alternative life-path. The front’s only half a curmudgeon.
The road is slick with moisture. If they hydroplane,
you can say goodbye to my own future life. Yet
she’s quiet at PennCrest, stubbornly resistant to
attempts to draw her out. She’s his girl Friday more
than wife. Real marriage hovers in the future as
a homing beacon, against the ravages of too many
deal-related parties, intermediaries imploring her
to step back, climb on his loaded lap, the one & only.
Body/soul unity haunts her waking hours, a vision
inherited from the Renaissance shakes her semi-addled brain.

The most crucial future comrade migrates from flat to flat,
the length of Manhattan; saved from school’s repetitive
rigors, yet awkward against others more normal. As is
often the New York spin, there is no getting close. Kids
come & go. She’s got the pluck, as is ascertained, to paint
what she wants. The most difficult forms flow easily
out of her, as though she were a weird, worrisome windup
doll to defy the lightness of touch used to lighting up
the New York art firmament, a gem for someplace else,
not dust-binned yet, but close. Half-noticing, she also
imposes a posture of defiance on her life, wired into willfulness.
Day-to-day, the grind is to take the advanced forms, find
somewhere to migrate with them. The vision behind is crystal.
I was destined to defy the motorbike with paper piles, marriages. Right?