Still Life With Jar and Crescent 

For Sung Hwa Kim

Not that the cut flowers are dead exactly,

but that they never were alive. The fickle blooms 

are lacking line. Their value is that of all values

superimposed, recalling the throbbing lattice 

of a television translating signals 

without information—vacancy. A glass surface, 

notwithstanding, is a closed system, improbable

transmitting, reflecting, and absorbing

light simultaneously. The painter

elected to circumvent this 

representational problem 

by furnishing the glib translucency

of a jar’s profile with a pastoral 

scene acutely more desirable 

than what exists outside it. A spring field

at dusk stretches to hills undulating

with a regularity only attained 

in fantasy. Vast invisible winds

move through long grasses and poppy blooms made 

with a gesture that made the scarlet moon

low on the horizon, exuberant 

and inessential as breath. Field is 

an immensity that doesn’t exclude

containment, unlike the city outside,

it’s parallel lines bathed in the green 

light of unreality, which is diffused 

through all space. Through a frameless window flanked

by the gauze of inert curtains laying 

a fold, stiff like glass or a posed hand, 

on the table where the jar is, indicating 

ownership. The curtains obscure the omitted 

glass but not our unstable gazing of 

“outside,” what disdains

to concern us. The dark city was made 

to serve the images it would produce. 

At one point or other, the “when” not being 

the matter at hand, images of flowers 

proliferated until the flowers themselves

became screens. The world became

a record of itself, tasked us to fret 

about its surfaces. But this is not 

the painting’s grief, 

not that waking life feels like the mute pulse

between stations on the radio

not that things imagined are the most real. 

And still, the dance of inside and outside 

persists. A flake of dream enters the exterior 

space and we suffer its entrance. Always

intersecting opposites constituting 

each other. Always distinction. “Flower” 

and “Not-Flower.” “Jar” and “Wilderness.” “Earth.” 

“Sky.” And still, in fictive lands beyond 

the cynicism of aesthetic maturity

exists the wish in earnest for truth 

ineluctable. We may enjoy the dream 

of easy work, of lands renewed

as we do the phthalo city or the petal 

like a shard of the dead-center moon 

glinting our momentary awareness 

as it falls.