Janet Kaplan / Change


                                - after Gerhard Richter


1.
Ice-slough, snow-melt, runoff. Over any season’s spring or autumn: impermanence. The
squeegee effect: basalt on silk, photographic. Such control in an abstract piece. It gets
darker as it moves from left to right.


2.
The squeegee effect switches from vertical to horizontal, glides and streaks across the
screen.


3.
There is nothing stereotypically reminiscent of Jerusalem.


4.
Not light but suggestive of light, and this is what matters most.


5.
A portrait of me and my opinions! Am I moving or is the building? Neither! The paint is
moving. The illusion of motion: a roll of toilet paper on a dispenser.


6.
Organic bomber planes, zucchini flowers, captions. All of it blurry, a Seurat that never
comes clear, no matter how far you stand.


7.
A herd of swine is unlike a car, which is the hero. The swine are cloud-shaped and blurry.
The car’s headlamps are desperately readable. Ulysses!


8.
Eight glass nurses, too sharp to be true. Famous nurses: don’t we know them by name?
We are famous, raised to a single idea of knowing the nurses by name!



9.
The cities are horrible! The country is horrible! The effect of those columns and trees is
eternal rigidity. Then there was the business of pleating, the vertical things squeezed
together in accordion folds. Rain solidified in thin metallic beams. A-line dresses and
steeples, giraffe necks and raised rifles. My lost aunt, her perfect bouffant.


10.
Mary and the angel Gabriel, their black and white moods. Cityscapes, faces with Groucho
eyebrows, glaciers, eagles bloodless as newsprint. The aftermath of Gabriel fleeing, like a
palette of charcoals—ashes aglow—cold as galvanized steel.


11.
Minus “human” anything. Not even “God” casting sky three-quarters down the length of
the scene. This must be an annunciation, this a coil of energy. A rag of light commanding
a group of trees.


12.
The surface of the moon seen from television shortly before lift-off. Ulysses is visible in
Circe’s mirror, fleeing the spacecraft.


13.
Sand pocked by rain. Where the rain touched down. Where it will not.


14.
The evaporated rain. The smooth sand.


CUE:  A Journal of Prose Poetry
Spring / Summer 2005, Issue II, Volume 2