For Wassily Kandinsky
The cleanest mirrors are piles of ash,
Rorschach blots,
And grassy-backed cloudy panoramas.
Mauve mandalas
In gutter-side rain puddles
Reflect internal formations
Unrealized but already constructed,
Carmine contractions of the gut
Smolder externally in anxious cerise sunsets.
We’ve got to keep on mapping
The internal cavernous landscape
Adorned with richly dripping stalactites
Until we are deep enough
That we can’t see the figurative stuff anymore –
The portraits and pastorals and still lives
All stuffed up there stagnant
While down in the dark,
The splotchy shapes behind our eyes emerge
And we can see interior colors
That are the shadow-casters
Of those mirrored in the mere surface kind of art
That turns inside out the already empty.