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27 May 2025
Patrick
Wright
New
Moon
Robert Rauschenberg’s
𝑈𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑙𝑒𝑑
After Robert Rauschenberg’s
Untitled (c. 1951)
& already I see alpines
prise their way through the brutalist grey
of Chernobyl floors. Through the sarcophagus
they reach for sunlight. Maybe we only learn
what the burn of graphite means once blind.
I know you better after knowing disaster.
of Goethe and Albers where the wheel
& the wheel of life are a way to feel closer.
I am the stalk through the fallout, one that insists
on pushing its way & one that’s been patient.
On the surface we share the mark of detonation.
They say a town like this is void
though one pulse of a deer’s heart
makes it a plenum. A full spectrum will reveal
itself only when you’ve pledged to cease
hurting. Through this I see what you saw
when the sun set & made shades on a radiator.
We are both on the side of art.
Behind the poem...
This poem forms part of my PhD thesis, and my poetry collection, Exit Strategy. It‘s an example of how I use abstract artworks as a lens through which to refract the experience of profound grief. I‘m intrigued by the possibilities of images such as Rauschenberg’s Untitled – formless, monochromatic. By how these give a poet access to intense emotions, where the aim is not so much description but finding a correspondence or analogue with what the artist intended.