Several years ago, we went to a concert held at the Santa Fe Opera. The two performers were Andrew Bird and someone new and unknown to me. Her name is St Vincent. After 3 songs, our friend wanted to leave, but I could not leave that voice, any more than Odysseus could walk away from the Sirens sweetly singing, or why no one ever leaves a Springsteen concert before it ends. I had no idea how extensive her hypnotic voice had traveled into modern ears.

So last week, Vicki and I went to see Nowhere Inn, the “documentary” about Anne Clarke, AKA St Vincent. It was an exploration into the relationship between Fame and the individual psyche that must brush her teeth in the morning , and each night become a superstar gladiator in which art overcomes angst for the rest of us. AYE THERE’S THE RUB. That dichotomy has usually proved too much for the mere mortal side of the human fiber and substance. Jimi, Janice, James Dean, Billie Holliday, the Icarus list goes on and on.

Now that I am seventy, one of my concerns is figuring out how my poetry can exist in the world after I am not. In the documentary, all of St Vincent’s concerts say “Sold Out’ and she must live with the constant intrusion upon her neurons. That is not my DOC.

Another victim of too much notoriety on an unprepared brain was Jackson Pollock,, who was forced to be the face of American post-war art, since he was the only painter Born In The USA out of all the abstract expressionists. That did not end well for him.

This is my homage to him.

Parallax Pollock

Like the meconium melodrama of a fetus’s first breath,
lamenting the loss of Lee’s labial devotion,
with a punch from your father’s broken nights,
you sat sunrise upon a pepper mill foundation.

Your enterprise validates a nexus of hue and dark hope,
landfill negligence, the ancient fantasy of Hammurabi,
one sneeze blasted your trepidations
beyond the cast of the mirror’s anger

Here the River Styx flooded your brain,
forcing a pattern of pinch and stutter,
yellow of chalice, blue of malice,
as the drifting knife rejoined your magic palette.

Oh, those tragic postings, to Einstein and to Matisse,
your endless summer battles of your thirty-eighth year.