Marjorie Welish
About the Length of an Arc

Weighing left-handedness on the canvas, 

                        Demonstrably yours, Cy. 

 

He let the line drop. He said: "Imagine that we have 

straightened the wire without stretching it." 

Below it, a number that may measure the wire 

while abstaining from it. 

                 In basic idoms 

of boundlessness, the canvas invites writing

a number in abstinence, 

or as though "out-to-lunch," which is a sure sign of

 inward boundlessness is Vico, 

                     who is elsewhere 

taking his forks, yet also and fundamentally, taking his fork 

with his left and transferring it to his right

in his children, his commitments. 

 

Of language and the prelinguistic 

left-handedness and "vocalissmus" at its source, he had something to say, 

would have apprehended the difficult fixative in. the words "speak it." 

Speak right-handedly, he advises. 

 

"If you ask me, that thundershower is through-composed." 

 

Meanwhile analysis grew and grew in the baby. 

"B" and then "B" and then "Brr." 

With performative scratches and eventual socialization, left to right, 

the roaring wind. The wind in vagaries

 let us stutter further 

            for a wealth of 

usage more analytical when left-handed than he seems in ratiocination. . ., 

reversing "B" in time 

to rest our conceptions. 

You left your watch to wind down. 

 

                    Pa-pa! 

From the lips of bed, P rolled out a beginning, drove a thundering 

    hangover 

from bed to earth. "May one begin where one pleases?" he asked. 

 
Found In Volume 25, No. 05
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Marjorie Welish
About the Author

 

Marjorie Welish's The Annotated 'Here' and Selected Poems was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing on art has appeared in Art in AmericaArt InternationalArt NewsBOMB (magazine)Partisan Review, and Salmagundi. A collection of her art criticism came out in 1999 entitled, Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960.

 

She has received grants and fellowships from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Fifth Floor Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the International Studio Program, the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.