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10-29-2024

Jacob McArthur Mooney

TRIPTYCH OF THE LOST KANDINSKYS

 

“If not destroyed after the Nazis’ Degenerate Art Expo, the three Kandinskys would have entered the public domain in 1991, and perhaps adorned our common objects: phonebooks, calendars, T-shirts . . . .” —Frank Schumpeter

 

COMPOSITION 1 (PHONEBOOK)

 

There’ll be no hope for recognition here.

 

Don’t be embarrassed;

I’m also lost.

 

I made Frank and all this seeing up to sell a bill of story.

 

How would you decode these spiritual demands

except to say I know and maybe Thank you?

 

In this room there are the books I’ll never read

and the books I’ll never reread

and then there is the telephone book,

               my other friend.

Though it’s not coming with us on the trip.

 

It is 1991.

Kandinsky’s anchored thoughts

split a dozen cryptic figures

posed in front of one another

to mock us with their pattern,

 

locking arms to necks,

framed but unspoken-of

by Bell’s palatial blue.

 

A clutch of Delta tickets. A nest of Old Milwaukees.

My hand, and the shadow of my hand, and the listings.

 

Spiritual like the way

an explosively hated idea

particulates the air

until it settles on new pages.

Spiritual like the non-possession of a body.

Weightless so it falls into its gist,

into capital.

 

Adoption. Purchase. Degenerate. “The.

Sun. Melts. All. Of. Moscow. Down. To.

A. Single. Spot. Of. Light.”  Liles. Lillard. Linares.

Lindbergh. Lindbergh. Lindbergh’s Pizzeria . . .

 

COMPOSITION II (CALENDAR)

 

Highlighter alights on a long weekend:

                   Fuck-it Festival

tattooed across the lines meaning

Friday and Saturday nights.

 

The seasonal relief is all sunspots and dust.

Kandinsky did not love the weather,

but he loved the lidded touch discovered by lit things.

The words Terry’s Esso

interrupt his leftmost strokes. Terry exists,

though you have never met him. Still,

 

it is bourgeois to see a human figure

where there isn’t one.

 

I don't know what Kandinsky meant

when he called himself a prophet.

 

He died like other people,

which is to say, surprised.

 

COMPOSITION III (T-SHIRT)

 

First a novelty tote bag with a picture of the Duke Boys

and a caption joking Sons of the New South,

then a kid in a racially insensitive baseball cap,

his dad with Kandinsky’s third attempt

stretched from shoulder to Simpsons buckle.

 

The Fuck-it Festival flukes towards its lame duck period

as the temperature slugs to three digits

and a pocket radio plays Whitney Houston

to help the crowds outside Space Mountain

manage their mortality, converting hung terror

into spontaneous Super Bowl pre-games,

the National Waltz into 4/4 time.

 

The Soviets have given up.

Everyone is digging for oil in the Arctic.

What is one more attempt to explain yourself

as the half-swallowed consequence of art?

I don’t know how I got here.

I should be nine years old and sober.

Florida is golf courses,

gift shops full of bamboo pants.

 

The dad in the Kandinsky shirt smacks the kid’s hat.

It lands face down at my feet saying Starter.

O, public market,

just please don’t let me die during wartime.

 

THREE-MILE PANORAMA OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER

 

I’ll draw you in, American-eyed pedestrians of London.

Keep your minds aloft, your nose out of the mud

and my misshapen fauna. I’m self-taught. Take an arm,

and make your long blue way down the delta,

through the valley laid out like paid imagination

around the castle grounds. I don’t owe you more

than what magic makes between us. A cut-up canvas

in a farmer’s shed in Lexington. One in Charleston.

One draped around a lady from Edinburgh

who wore it to her grave, cape of switchgrass

tucked over Scottish shoulders. Walk with a lover.

I know lovers like admission prices: they’re fluid.

 

*

 

Musicians visible in certain light

between the sun and stitching scars

play the best Yankee Doodle Dandy

local studio hands could slap together. Fix your gaze,

the couples up ahead are rivercraft.

Stubbornness, slave narratives

and the pop of new concessions

return to their motherland like men hit by lightning:

wide-eyed, buckled at their knees.

Notice nothing.

My three-mile panorama is just 3,000 feet.

Whose feet, yours? They could be.

 

*

 

I funded this work by selling minor landscapes

and helping hunters clean their kill.

They’ll have it disassembled into pieces for the trip.

Restored in Maine and struck for Boston. Put up,

cut down. One last time and then

left for cloth and burping blankets. A doll’s dress.

Teepees hanging in a child’s room.

Somewhere in the Reconstruction South

there’s a painting of a bearded northerner,

easel underarm. That’s me.

I drew myself in, one tourist for another.

I will always be where I take you.

 

“THE COYOTE IS ALWAYS MORE HUMILIATED THAN HARMED BY HIS FAILURES”

 

If I didn’t plan for dinner, my directness

would introduce nothing but my self-defeat.

I ask the mustache-twirler wound inside of me

to plate a silent prayer for mangy boys

and ridicule. Don’t look at me, I’m eating.

 

One year, the lights dimmed on peak expression

and I began to slap myself to show frustration.

Cartoon-like at lower speeds, antic at fast ones.

It was not a punishment raised against my own person,

but control bloating out into encounter.

 

I lampooned until my ribs accordioned

with synchrony and sound effects. Saying:

I’m in pain, and I am pain’s performer.

The ache I raise is made to be displayed.

-from Frank's Wings, selected by Fall 2024 PoemoftheWeek.com Guest Editor Hollay Ghadery. 

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Jacob McArthur Mooney is a Canadian poet, blogger, and literary critic. He is most noted for his 2011 poetry collection Folk, which was a shortlisted Trillium Book Award finalist for English poetry in 2012. 

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