Emily Rosko
Less Art, More Monkeys
All the great artists were designing curtains
for the Unemployment Department
in
for the pacifier advertisement that
shows
torpedoes whizzing into a baby’s round
mouth.
The caption read: “In transforming
nature, man
transforms himself,” under a photograph of an
emaciated
labor camp prisoner in
Realism was just what the
authorities wanted.
These were beautiful times. After the War, after
the purges,
Eisenstein was condemned
for his film
where Ivan the Terrible acted as a
stand-in
for Stalin. Symphonies tumbled
into dissonance.
What’s
that Fadeyev? You
say you are guarding a latrine? Zoshchenko’s
monkey was truthful; Anna Akmatova’s love
poetry was too decadent, too bourgeois.
Brodsky was a parasite, Bulgakov
long dead
by the time the devil took grip in
Before all this, Malevich was busy designing
what would be “The New Form of Art.”
His painting “The Black Square”
tells us:
whatever you can build with your mind
can order reality.
Easily
reproducible, it stands
solidly, a weight behind your eyelids. A
square
because it’s functional, highly modern.
Black
and unobtrusive, so you will not be
impressed by where it’s
all leading.
Insulation
You could fry
an egg on it.
Records buckle.
What doesn’t wilt, expands—
clematis sprouts from twigs and cords
through lattice. A watchdog is knocked
out
in the shade. Clouds congeal over
the lake
harvesting moisture—graying. The elderly
are warned to jack up the A/C while
others
abandon work to sink
into cool sheets.
Wait it out, we’re told—
The earth was once this way—it steamed
for ages then shrank under
ice. All that is worthwhile lies in
mute
places—diamonds pinched between rock and
ossified
remains of animals we learn of
from cartoons. We weren’t as fearful
of mass
destruction then—
unknown debris in space, or atoms
contained and hurled against each
other in a cyclotron. There were duck-
and-cover methods, shelters for meltdown,
mountains to store waste as it
decays, half-lives spent and the
notorious
two-headed monsters created. For entertainment
the neighborhood kids hit one other
with water balloons. Some blond boys
pair up and pelt an auburn girl—
A radio crackles feverishly. Carpenter
bees whine in the porch wood.
She’ll grow a thick skin.