Finding Solace in Artistry

The Los Angeles artist Alex Israel sees a vivid exuberance in Terrance Hayes’s reflection on the comforts and perils of taking refuge in art.

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ARS POETICA FOR THE ONES LIKE US

I like the story about the man who talks
God into letting him live until he is done
With his masterwork. In some versions

He is a painter, but in this one he is a singer
Who then sings every sentence, whose song
Becomes a poem that does not end

Because it is eternally revised. Who can say
Whether Orpheus, when he found honey
In other hives, did not sing to let the devil know

His body was alive? He was the first to grieve,
Years in advance, the news of his death.
At the wake I explained that the poem could be

Thought of as a house: a room where a boy
Undresses before a slightly older girl and vanishes
Inside her robe; a basement where the furnace

And pipes hold what keeps the house erect;
An attic where aesthetic and spiritual innuendos
Float. If I could have stepped out of the poem,

My feet would have remained four or five inches
Above ground because the ground was covered
In four or five inches of snow. It is breath

That makes the tragic endurable. It is daylight
That provides our basis for being rooted
To ourselves. It is evening that lets us,

For an instant, be possessed by someone else.
I believed, for example, that I was in control.
The girl, I think her name was Yurie, told me

The poem would want the windows
Closed. I tried drawing her face to my face
So that her face could be described.

From inside the poem I was asked to map
The world outside and the adventure to unfold.
I looked at the window, but I could not see

Through the window because it resembled
An abstract painting colored by a veil of quiet
And shadows. Some things in this world

Do not depend on speech to be felt.
Remember too that the eyes are not flesh,
That crisis is initiated by the absence of witness,

That Orpheus, in time, became nothing
But a lying-ass song
Sung for the woman he failed.

—TERRANCE HAYES