Jay DeFeo finished her painting “The Rose” in 1966, after working on it for eight years in her San Francisco apartment. Measuring approximately 11 feet tall by 8 feet wide, layer after layer of paint, up to 11 inches thick in some places, and weighing more than a ton, “The Rose” is her masterpiece. It’s the painting many think of when they hear the name, Jay DeFeo. She lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of her adult life, where I also lived for many years. But it wasn’t until her retrospective at The Whitney Museum in 2013, that I became familiar with her work. “The Rose” has a thrilling quality I hadn’t experienced with other paintings, and it pulled me in with its overwhelming power and beauty.
Though I didn’t know I’d write an ekphrastic poem on it. In an early draft, I wrote “I don’t want to think about anything but this painting, the way it makes / me close my eyes so I can listen to it,” but that wasn’t really accurate. I wanted to experiment and move away from narrative, or from saying something “about” it. I wanted the poem to go inside, to enter the painting’s wildness, and to be a sort of love poem to it, and its maker. The line, “does the painter get to behave / like time” owes a debt to Robert Hass.
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The Rose
After Jay DeFeo
Oil with wood and mica on canvas (1958-66)
shadow insomnia echo
multitude of amphora gust glass
rotation sabbath mountain-ridge
daylight (not quite window) origin
crumbling relic balcony ajar
intersect nature stain on stain crevice
trumpetcage define what you mean by
sameness lather blindfold replenishing
nucleus sad nucleus is that a tornado
footprint fool you fool machine
lampshade monster illusion stereotype
ghost gothic shrine close your birthmark
cave volcano lava diatribe smear
scar does the painter get to behave
like time incandescent root umbrella
look what you did to my heatstroke
repetition do you mean like a tunnel
superstition dented garden
pedal the headstone application
please stop cigarette ash stain
on stain nostalgic ritual feeling lonely
wait that’s a question cathedral
ocean candlewax field longhand
flowerwilt shells to put your ear to
birdwing thermostat brushstroke
translation to look down to see
the repaired clouds on fire
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Lawrence Kaplun‘s poems have appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review, Sonora Review, and Toad. He’s from California, and currently lives in Brooklyn.
THE HOME SCHOOL 