Richard Siken

Best-selling poet and painter Richard Siken uses strong, bold strokes to reveal a world abstract, concrete, and exquisitely complex.

War of the Foxes

from “landscape with a blur of conquerors”

sage lynn

The body swerves / in the service of the mind, which is evidence of / the mind but not actual proof. 

from "landscape with fruit rot and millipede"

What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be / alive. Something dead that doesn't know it's dead.

Take a body, dump it, drive. Take a body, maybe / your own, and dump it gently. All your dead, / unfinished selves and dump them gently. Take only / what you need. The machine of the world--if you / don't grab on, you begin to tremble. And if you do / grab on, then everything trembles.

Blackbird, he says. So be it, indexed and normative, but it isn't a bird, it's a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn't looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible.

Unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn't there, with a song in its throat that you don't want to hear but you paint anyway.

kemi

The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and the hand wants to do something useful. 

Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart

The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects, so what’s there to be faithful to? / There is no light in the paint, so how can you argue with them?

Why take more than we need? Because we can. / You’d break your heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull when the mind swells. / 

The mind fights the body and the body fights the land. It wants our bodies, the landscape 

, and everyone runs the risk of being swallowed up. / We do not walk through a passive landscape. The paint dries eventually. The bodies decompose eventually.

Something’s not right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it—living in the worst parts, ruining myself. / The enormity of my desire disgusts me.

A man had two birds in his head. / and the birds would sing all day never stopping. / 

War of the Foxes quotes

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