There has been a growing tendency in recent
years to emphasize the purely
visual aspects of the visual arts...
- Jack A. Hobbs
When a skunk takes a step backwards in your direction,
plumy tail raised, rear paws lifted slightly off the ground,
even a person brought up on traffic fumes and good bagels
must know that ducking is not an adequate response.
How instinctive is this knowledge? And what about
the stock responses required of children by their parents?
For a kiss on the cheek: a kiss back, a smile, or a sheepish
eye-rolling backhand swipe. Any of these, right?
But not the remark, "Ugh, get offa me, you creep."
As parents we do not think to explain this the way
we firmly ordain that one does not paint the face
with mashed potatoes, or consume a sandwich
while gripping it between the toes. You just know.
But when looking at a painting on the wall, a painted image
made with lines and shapes and colors, some familiar,
some not, some overly, how counterintuitive to learn not
to think of it as a visual experience. This is not taught.
You have to bumble through life picking up this sort of thing
at openings you can't get into without being the gallery owner's
mistress or son, or having so large a sum of money
that your parents never even had to hand it to you,
it was sewn into the pockets of your size 2T shorts
by work-stiff great-grandparent hands, and you knew it
without digging your pudgy 2T fingers in there to make sure.
But what is knowledge? Must the known thing be true?
Some people have always known women are inferior to men,
and some know perfectly well that dreaming of dahlias
means the woman of your dreams will betray you
(wilted, with your best friend) and that spilling salt
on your lap on a first date... well, you know.
Some know hell is waiting like a tongueless molten mouth
for their neighbors. Others will tell you to be careful with mulch
or you'll get slugs. Or won't tell you, hoping you'll get slugs.
Is it what you learn in the sandbox, in the alley, or in the backseat
with your flatulent younger sister crossing the country,
or in the backseat with your first lover (front seat with second,
stick shift?), or in the dark closet at five, or at the blackboard
at thirty-four? What is the most important piece of knowledge
you now have? Did someone give it to you readily
or did you have to wrest it as from a slobbering beast
from a life of pissed-off bosses? Emotionally damaged lieutenants?
Will you share it with me? Would I even get it?
How can you know I don't know it already,
and wouldn't that be humiliating for you,
to discover that the thing which took you so long to learn
I picked up at fourteen, slapping my smooth forehead even then.
Has knowledge enhanced your capacity to enjoy the world?
I'd say not. I'm guessing from the look on your face.
Maybe it's just as well there are plums of knowledge
most of us will never thumb from our Christmas pies.
Sure, some of us will mistake the writing on the wall
for random subway graffiti, though it isn't ever random,
is it, being in fact a kind of painting, though not visual,
not primarily, at least not if you don't look at it.
© 2005 J. Allyn Rosser
's second volume of poems, Misery Prefigured, won the Crab Orchard Award. Her first, Bright Moves, was awarded the Morse Poetry Prize by Charles Simic. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, Yaddo, Breadloaf, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has won the Peter I.B. Lavan Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared recently in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Slate.com, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Hunger Mountain, and several anthologies.
Rosser lives in Athens, Ohio, and teaches in the Ohio University creative writing program.
