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 

lack 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, improbable system,

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 the gesture that made the scarlet moon—

low on the horizon—exuberant 

and inessential as breath. Field is 

an immensity that does not 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, commanding  

the unstable eye of the viewer  

to “outside”—what disdains

to concern us. The dark city was made 

in service of 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. 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, from our high interior.