Ocean Park 114

I stare through the window,

hidden in the security of darkness peeking into light.

I can't believe it, not here,

not framed by overflowing garbage cans,

not by cracked sidewalk and cigarette butts,

by soot and faint urine.

But there it is, nonetheless, as if lost and also unconcerned with loss,

A Deibenkorn.

It hangs deep in a formal dining room,

a picture framed in a picture window.

A Deibenkorn, I'm sure,

neither a print nor a poster, but the real deal.

I've never seen a Deibenkorn, not in the flesh.

Only in books, now only through glass.

I sigh steam in the cold night.

The woman there, and the man,

they fail to notice the privilege upon their wall.

She paces before it, ruining my view.

It taunts me, the Deibenkorn,

with unaccountably rich sky blues,

ghosts of phalo and rose,

sharp, violent rakes of horizontal knife edges,

subtle verticals, and diagonals bisecting like thoroughfares,

geometric, precision wandering.

Ocean Park?

What else could wield such power on a plain blue board?

The woman paces, circling the man.

She's distracted, perhaps upset,

otherwise she would know to move aside.

Some terrible trauma befuddles her,

or she would realize she obscures her one worthy thing.

Oil on canvas, like an edited aerial photograph,

hard-lined, soft-colored, feeling to my eyes like rough, painted wood.

It takes me out of dark, out of cold, out of the gritty city to the blue, clouded sky

above beaches, parking lots and the flat Imperial Valley.

I've not been to Ocean Park, nor to California or any open place.

Horizons here are measured in feet ending in brick affronts,

except past this glass and on through that portal of whitened blues and delivered blacks.

The Deibenkorn is a way in, the way out of here.

The dark cannot penetrate.

He loosens his tie, a gray tie of a gray suit on a gray man.

Neither he nor she deserve my Diebenkorn,

blue on blue on salmon, lines of black more alive than the man in the gray.

They should look upon it, not glare at each other.

He is shaking her, shouting. How did I miss that?

Their argument began out of mind, beyond the frame of my Deibenkorn.

What could fuel their fight?

The responsibility? The duty of ownership?

The contrast with their lives?

How could they bear it? How could I? Only the glass offers perspective.

I wish he wouldn't beat her there.

If they would just move to the side a little...