A Paul Klee Exhibit

Jim Nawrocki

Viewed in reverse chronological order

    First his late trees:
    blooms,
    harlequin birds,

    stems dissipating
    into a purple cloud
    or a head

    all ballooned
    on the strength
    of having to be.

    Not chaos, an array.
    To become this
    one has to unravel

    from discernible life,
    the fog and slow mania
    permitted

"from each suggestion
    of structure -a body
    reclining on a limb perhaps

    or a landscape
    etched in hairline strokes,
    each blade of grass, each tree, each cloud

    alive to dismantlement.
    Quarks, they say,
    quiver with a secret charge,

the smallest there is
and yet, they build us,
their leaps of faith

bringing us
to our fundamental element,
forever poised

between the luck of birth
and the brightness
of what's hidden.