Philip Kobylarz, Every Last Lover, Photograph
TRYING TO BE SEEN IN THE UNSEEN
Doctor, I’m older than you think, younger
than I think. But I can’t tell you what I remember
without explaining exactly what she did
and how. Self-portrait signed with purple ink,
the only color among the scribbles. Then a nude
from behind. Then a nude of herself belly up in a bath,
signed with her eraser through the shadings.
A continuous pencil line traces her profile,
each sheet a different contour, suspicion
of a fruit or tree. At the gallery, she drags a pencil line
off a framed paper to the inlaid floor,
following its bare momentum until it bumps into a corner
and rises on the wall, describing the edge of her upper arm,
shoulder, neck and cheek before stopping
at the peak of her stretch, well short of the ceiling.
In her bedroom, while no one else watches,
she admires the cut and flow of her dress,
clouds in the blue above her waist,
sails fluttering below in the blue on her thighs.
She draws on the wall next to her mirror,
first her head weightless on the wick of her neck,
but the lines escape into a scrum of marks, the wall
almost the same color as the pencil lines.
The index finger of her dream hand, a left hand
though she’s right-handed when awake,
traces the hem of her sheet to the edge of a floorboard
and up a curtain to the window where it slips
into the profile of a cloud that soon disappears.
Before she wakes, she rolls off her bed
onto a large sheet of paper she left on the floor
before going to bed, rolling over pencil dust
she left there the night before.
____________
Richard Ryal
Review by Theric Jepson
At first this seems to be a catalogue of a woman’s beauty as documented by herself, but the poem’s momentum takes the speaker away from her intentional art to her lived beauty to aspects of her loveliness created by his own imagination. Although the form is that of medical confessional, almost as if he is victim to some witchery, his victimhood is just a veneer for his brain turning her from agent into object. Now, I too have lived through this kind of fathoms-deep infatuation: interest deepening to a crush which then swirls out of the crusher’s control, the object of infatuation ceasing to be a living human and becoming a symbol, a dream, a fae untouchable. Evolution designed us to fall like this. And what a beautiful pain! But what will this man—and his brain—do next?
Review by Jared Pearce
While it’s fun to watch the artist consider herself from all these angles, I admit I’m very interested in the speaker talking to a doctor. And I like that the poem doesn’t waste time trying to explain why some person is describing the artist’s actions—what’s important is not the confession, but the confessing, I think.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
A life-like study, limb by limb, frame by frame, room by room: we chase our muse, her silhouette, her webby lines – in these, we are caught. A feverish recount of movements and drawings that run in and out of the physical restrictions of mounts, corners, walls: we are lost into a scrum of marks, into her new order, lost paradise where suspicion of a fruit or tree grants us the freedom to go wherever she pleases.
Poetry, this construction to which it is impossible to attribute an age or a structure: the movements are ethereal, vigils and dreams follow opposite and contrary grammars expressed in calligraphy we cannot fully decipher. The trace she leaves, confined to pencil dust like gunpowder waiting to be ignited, grey on grey, unseen, is in fact the only way to be seen. Doctor, doctor, can’t you see, I’m burning, burning? (from Thompson Twins, Doctor! Doctor!)