Marina Adams, from New Alphabet, 2010, 12×12”, gouache on handmade Indian paper. All images courtesy of the artist.

Marina Adams, from New Alphabet, 2010, 12×12”, gouache on handmade Indian paper. All images courtesy of the artist.

 

     THE DREAM I HAD ENDED

“NOW
     I’M
       FREE
         OF LOVE
           AND OF POSTERS”
  —Mayakovsky
  6.VI.1924

going back to an absent source,
between object and score
brushing away flies with my thoughts
the size of postcards burning
“three beautiful women from Prague”—
  I thought he said “burning”
talking about the picture

realism:—war is kind is the title of a
poem the guy told me, a shell in the kernel,
those fluttering flags at the top of the tower,
  shadow of an arc
against the wall, sunspots on shadow
  wars

a woman looks at the toe of her boot
  inventing the present and
  presuming
a kind of accuracy or at least
theatricality, tensions between elements
almost implausible, a fugue, a kind of
authorial sampling, funnels

of forms of violence “evidence-
based”—

 

“A GREEN WINE I LOVE”
  —Raphael Rubinstein

Missing something? Twenty more years
to see & smell the Mediterranean again
(perhaps). White hair. Beautiful white heart
on the froth in the bowl of café au lait this
morning. C.C. in her vest and white shirt. I
have just set my cigarette on fire. A book just
flew over. Next time you are in town, we’ll
meet. Did it say more oil or mere oil? Then it
was too short. How could I have missed it?

 

“WE’RE ALL GUESTS OF EXPERIENCE”

says Pasternak. Step away when the song is
about to fall into the air. Everything gets short
like those old etchings. Complete in your
mind the balcony of history. Her white blouse
untucked in this heat, car keys glittering in his
hand as he walks away. A man falls onto the
deck, hit but not sunk. He sits on the chair,
looking over at the other chair. When we
consider history—be quiet! Redeemable, we
will get you a new dream. My memories,
I leave them to you.

 

—Marina Adams is a painter living and working in New York and Parma, Italy. Her work has been exhibited in the US and Europe. She had a one-person exhibition at Magazzino d’Arte Moderna in Rome and a recent solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation in NYC. She is a visiting art professor at Rhode Island School of Design. An installation shot and individual images of New Alphabet can be seen at marinaadams.tumblr.com.

—Norma Cole’s most recent books of poetry are Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988–2008 and NATURAL LIGHT. A book of essays and talks, TO BE AT MUSIC just appeared from Omnidawn Press. Cole has received awards from the Gerbode Foundation, Gertrude Stein Awards, Fund for Poetry, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.

 

This issue of First Proof is funded, in part, by the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation and the Thanksgiving Fund.

Additional funding is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, and readers like you.