SOURCE: "Jorie Graham: Art and Erosion," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 373-95.

[In the following essay, Costello considers the visual images at the center of the poetry in Erosion.]

Jorie Graham emerged in the 1980s as a major poet, distinguished for her philosophical depth, her sensuous vision, the grandeur of her style and themes. In a decade of poetry stigmatized for its shrunken ambition, or sidetracked by politics and ideology, she celebrated the spiritual and metaphysical reach of art. In her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Graham limited her meditation primarily to tentative reflections based on natural objects. Erosion (1983) marked a striking maturity for this poet in finding a focus to the roving eye of Hybrids, and in understanding the iconic and even sacramental nature of her mind. Her language in this volume is marked by eloquence and sententious boldness, and she identifies her project more directly with that of monumental artists from the past. While ordered around a passion for mystery, the poems themselves aspire to the unity and completeness of an artifact rather than the residue of a process. Whatever twists of thought may arise in the poems end in a tied, integrated imagery, a tense unity.

Graham's emphasis on iconic representation and visual design in Erosion expresses at once her strong sense of the body and her resistance to the force of erosion. Painting rather than nature becomes her primary model for how we can pursue the invisible in the visible, how we can shape our limitations into a form that can surpass them. In relation to the word, the visual icon seems inexhaustible, infinitely deep, yet centered. Art is the implicit answer to Graham's query, "in what manner the body is united with the soule." It forms an alternative space to the world of erosion, a form of "rescue" from the flux, a means of centering vision and restoring unity beyond the grasp of reason and the word. In this celebration of beauty over knowledge, and art over history, Erosion is essentially a modernist text, whereas Graham's later work may be characterized as post-modern.

Erosion, loss, grief, the past, history, evolution, dispersion—these central facts of our world pervade the poetry. But they are almost always set against their opposite—the aesthetic transformation of the world as iconic design. The title poem, "Erosion," asserts:

     I would not want, I think, a higher intelligence, one
     simultaneous, cut clean
     of sequence. No,
     it is our slowness I love, growing slower,
     tapping the paintbrush against the visible,
     tapping the mind.

The mind of the painter "tapping the paintbrush against the visible" and of the beholder may be sequenced, but the work of visual art is not. Indeed, its major distinction from literary art is its simultaneity, its spatial rather than sequential presentation. Graham sets her intelligence toward images detached from their surroundings, held in a private, contemplative space and made timeless through aesthetic transformation, even as she remains in a dimension of history. It is not surprising, then, that eight of the poems in Erosion describe established masterpieces of visual art. Ecphrasis is her chief rhetorical strategy. The word is approach and commentary; the icon holds out a promise of presence. Even as Graham questions the value of design or acknowledges the "tragic" aspect of the pursuit of the eternal, hers is an essentially optimistic view of art. "The beautiful," the centering of images into an order where mystery is held and glimpsed, is Erosion's highest value.

In more recent work Graham has begun to decenter the image, thrusting it out of controlling aesthetic form and into personal and public history, unpacking and deconstructing its narrative and discursive implications. Film rather than painting has become her sister art. Erosion was a significant book for the eighties, however, because it boldly reasserted modernist values and ambitions which she has never entirely surrendered—the pursuit of the timeless, the impersonal, the beautiful over the brutality and flux of history, the desire of the mind for the eternal and the drive of art to pursue it. Now, however, vision occurs in moments wrested from chaos rather than preserved in sequestered icons.

Graham's strong pull toward an iconic center apart from the flux finds expression in both "Mist" and "Reading Plato." In each she conceives of a figure by which the transient world is arrested even as it is evoked. In "In What Manner the Body is United with the Soule," Graham pursues a single figure beneath the surface of the stream, which can be drawn out and elevated as art. The symbolist imagery of the poem presents the mutuality of body and spirit central to Erosion's idea of art. Graham's iconic imagination often forms a permeable inside/outside opposition as well. In "Still Life with Window and Fish" the interrupted and reassembled images of the external world define an inner space, a new dynamic unity in still form. In other poems ("To a Friend Going Blind," "Kimono," "The Lady and the Unicorn and Other Tapestries," "At the Exhumed Body of Santa Chiara, Assisi") Graham imagines design in terms of fabric—the world securely woven into a tapestry or sewn into a garment. The complex metaphor of stitching suggests that art is a means of mending a world we experience as broken, uniting the horizontal and the vertical, the temporal and the eternal, in its movement. This tapestried nature also clothes a mystery, giving a sense of depth to the physical world, a vanishing point in the design. The numinous is not dispersed, then, but hidden and disclosed in art.

Several poems in Erosion deal directly with a masterpiece of visual art—by Piero della Francesca, Luca Signorelli, Masaccio, Gustav Klimt. In these poems Graham poses as beholder, in the world of erosion, reflecting on the work, its relation to her world, and the creative process of the artist. Graham's preoccupation with Christian subjects (the Resurrection, the expulsion from the garden of Eden, the birth of Christ), which will continue in later volumes, suggests the importance of her analogy between Christian paradoxes and the mysteries of art. In her treatment of modern works Graham continues to conceive of art as a process of drawing off and transforming the given to a fabric that will enclose something infinite as its secret center. But she no longer takes for granted the nature of the mystery and the purpose of its aesthetic covering.

In "Mist" Graham describes the condition of consciousness ("this quick intelligence") we live in and act on. In our hungry rationality we are "blind" but "forever trying to finger the distinctions" between being and becoming, essence and existence. The mist represents the mind "making everything / part of itself," seeking "the whole idea" which eludes it. Our "geography" is better than our "history" as we try to map out a world in flux. But the mist also suggests, more traditionally, the condition of erosion in which we live and think.

The rational mind pursuing absolutes in a world of erosion ("the rose inside the rose that keeps on opening") fails, but the creative will provides an alternative:

                    and then
      this other still
      wherein it is a perfect rose
      because I snap it
      from the sky,
 
      because I want it,
 
      another, thicker, kind of sight.

In a world opening, being consumed, swimming, and waving good-bye, that is, the poet chooses an icon, not out of reason but out of desire. To counteract erosion she "snaps" a different mode of seeing, one thicker and thus more stable than the swimming, blind/deaf world of thought she has characterized throughout most of the poem. The rose is "perfect" not because it realizes a Platonic truth, but "because" her imagination draws it out from "the sky."

Similarly, in "Reading Plato" Graham describes her friend making lures. This action is a "beautiful lie" because it is based on the representation of a "good idea" of forms "past death, past sight," suspended from the world of erosion. Graham is anti-Platonic, believing not in ideal, rational forms but in "the body // they were all once / a part of." But she admires these lures, initiating here a distinction she will make frequently, between the beautiful (the forms of art. which may surpass reason in their importance to us) and the true (which eludes the forms of reason). While constructed of fragments of nature we experience as broken, the lures have a unifying force. "A hook / under each pair / of wings," they reunite body and spirit as they are cast into the stream. Graham contrasts our dispersed, sensuous "knowledge of / the graceful // deer" to the fly made out of deer hair because it is "hollow / and floats" (the form of our dissecting, abstract knowing). But the iconic lure, cast into the stream, has led her to imagine back to the whole. We will see in other poems that the dismemberment of reality is redeemed by the construction of forms that permit a glimpse of numinous wholeness.

The relation of the icon to the stream is again the focus of the three-part poem "In What Manner the Body is United with the Soule." This time what floats above the stream is not an artifact but an agency, a self, in the figure of a "miraculous / water-strider" which can "measure ripples / for meaning." Graham's connection of this invisible "meaning" with art is explicit from the beginning. The first section of the poem considers, through the metaphor of the stream, the effect of music. The sounds, their "surface tension / which is pleasure" lead to the sounding of "meaning /—small, jeweled, deep-water—/ flash." At the outset of the poem, then, the soul is understood in terms of the aspirations and effects of art. But music, the most abstract and temporal of the arts, must give way to iconic symbols for Graham. Indeed, in the next section that "flash" turns out to be "manuscripts / illuminated by monks" which are unearthed from "the mud / of the Arno." These verbal icons release their "gold" into the "lush browns" in which "all the difficulties / of the passage/ of time" are caught and held. Thus they "illuminate" the mud as the mud preserves them through time. "The self" is the center of this reciprocity:

       an act of
        rescue
      where the flesh has risen,
        the spirit
       loosened….

In the final section of the poem Graham writes only of the natural world, but her symbolist images mirror and unite earlier images of art. The stream which has run through each section is here "smaller, / almost still," as if made ready for creation, a "delay" in the "hurry" of life and erosion that allows for artistic vision. The "jewels" of meaning in section I are now held as "tiny insect / life" which the waterstrider-self consumes. The "gold bee," an image perhaps of the inspiration or food of art, parallels the gleam on the ice over the mud that holds the manuscripts. The golden eggs of the waterstrider-self are the creative expression of this insight:

      Of silence, mating striders make gold eggs
      which they will only lay on feathers
 
      dropped by passing birds or on the underside
      of a bird's tail before it wakens and
     flies off, blue and white and host to a freedom
 
     it knows nothing of.

The final movement here is clearly out of the stream, into the freedom of the disembodied spiritual, but the body is made, by the self, the vehicle of transcendence even as its direction may be elsewhere.

Each of the poems I have discussed deals with a condition of flux or erosion (figured as mist or stream), from which something iconic is constructed or fathomed, a "perfect rose," a "lure," an "elaborate gold frame," isolated parts that can evoke a whole. Along with this relation of icon and flux Graham frequently poses a relation of outside world and inside mind or art. Our minds want to draw the "outside" world into the "inside" structures of thought and representation. Graham presents this as a natural and positive impulse when driven by a regard for mystery, for the beautiful, rather than for rational meaning. The aesthetic, iconic "inside," while it is walled off from the world, evokes and transforms that world. This iconic space has its own indeterminate movement even as it resists temporality.

"Still Life with Window and Fish" is a celebration of aesthetic space and a study of its attractions. Fragments of the world "outside" the window (of her room, of her mind) are brought "inside," "dismembered" but also "remembered." They enter as shadows made when objects interrupt the passage of light—as what is seen in the window, held in the mind, or represented in ornamental designs. The "inside" forms a space where things are simplified and reassembled.

     The whole world outside
     wants to come into here,
     to angle into
     the simpler shapes of rooms, to be broken and
     rebroken
     against the sure co-ordinates
     of walls.

The "sure co-ordinates of walls," like the frames of art, designate a boundary in which images are sequestered from reality. But within the walls relations "blur" and "nothing starts or / ends," unlike the eroding world outside. Graham emphasizes that the space "inside" is partial and "broken," yet its delights are clear. The shadows, designs, and other images of the world outside are loosed from their physical boundaries:

    Here is a fish-spine on the sea of my bone china
    plate. Here is a fish-spine on the sea of my hand,
    flickering, all its freight
    fallen away.

The fish image returns here to suggest the transfiguration of the flux into an "indelible/surf," the surf-ace of art or imaginative transformation of reality. The self is drawn into this surf where the restless imagination can sustain itself against the tide of erosion:

             If I should die
      before you do,
      you can find me anywhere
      in this floral, featureless,
      indelible
      surf, We are too restless
      to inherit
      this earth.

This interior, formal space of "still life" provides a kind of rescue, then, from the world of erosion. Its very limitations and interruptions transfigure and save.

The same sense of an "inside" space which may "block the view" of the outside world but which, at the same time, may rescue us from erosion arises in "To a Friend Going Blind." The complete integration of many associative links in thispoem is testimony to art's power to unify. The poem begins with a description of walking:

     I had to walk this town's entire inner
     perimeter to find
     where the medieval walls break open
     in an eighteenth century
     arch.

Graham here recognizes both limitation and the artistic transformation of limitation which designs an inner space to be permeable to the outside, even to reveal it. The poet shifts abruptly to an apparently unrelated issue. "Bruna," a local seamstress, "is teaching me / to cut a pattern." Bruna is linked to the medieval town when her measuring tapes are described as "corn-blond and endless, / from her neck"—like Rapunzel's hair. Bruna is an artist, who, judging her "material" "for texture, grain, the built-in / limits," turns those limits into something useful and, incidentally, beautiful. As a kind of Rapunzel she can teach the poet, who can teach her imminently blind friend, to get imaginatively beyond the walls. We may remember that Rapunzel's lover was blinded by the witch until Rapunzel's tears fell upon his eyes and cured them. Bruna teaches how the outside world might come inside, transfigured, how limitation might provide access since the whole world itself seeks "interruption." Thus the poet's journey through the walled town is an imitation of the lesson from Bruna: "I wandered all along the street that hugs the walls, / a needle floating / on its cloth." Bruna teaches the usefulness of art: enclosed as we are within our tower, art can help us escape as Rapunzel's prince could not;

     When Bruna finishes her dress
     it is the shape of what has come
     to rescue her. She puts it on.

The controlling metaphor of "To a Friend," stitching, binds its two images (Bruna's sewing, walking the town's wall) into a kind of New Critical verbal icon. The metaphor informs nearly half the poems in Erosion. Stitching involves several varied but related desires for Graham: we desire to make of the world's raw material (and our own built-in limits) something that can "rescue" us from flux and that can give form to the numinous. We would bind together what is broken (the temporal and the eternal, life and death, the individual and the whole) and penetrate the gaps and cracks in our norms in order to create new wholes. Finally, we respond to the "beautiful," for the pleasure it gives and the mystery it shrouds. Stitching is an act of love, something that seeks to draw the objects of this world into a more permanent, shaped, beautiful "fabric" of art.

Graham expresses her measured faith in "stitching" in "The Lady and the Unicorn and Other Tapestries." The ephemeral world is woven into the permanent fabric of the tapestry:

     If I have a faith it is something like this: this ordering
        of images
     within an atmosphere that will receive them, hold them
         in solution, unsolved.

That "unsolved" is importantly double—undissolved by erosion, yet perpetually mysterious (the tapestry is a "still moment"), unapproachable by the interpretive invasion of the word.

The title is curious since the poem never mentions the central subjects of the famous tapestry series. The Cluny tapestries depict the Lady and the Unicorn in various postures that symbolize the five senses. In certain of these and other unicorn tapestries quail are shown settled on or rising from a tree, but they are more decorative than functional in the pictures. Even in the famous hunt tapestry (at the Cloisters in New York), it is the unicorn, not the quail, which is pursued. But it is precisely the decorative impulse, the impulse to design rather than to symbolism, that interests the poet. Graham's strategy of peripheral vision in response to classic works of art allows her the freedom to invent new meanings for these overdetermined works and to explore the nature of art itself as an aesthetic rather than a symbolic activity. The opening lines of the poem (quoted above) might well apply, implicitly, to the effect of the tapestries as a whole, however, since the tapestries depict a mysterious "ordering of images" in which lady and unicorn stand as paradoxical companions (chastity and virility).

The quail provide the link between the artwork and the familiar natural world and allow the poet to imagine that world itself in terms of design: "the quail / over the snow // on our back field run free and clocklike, briefly safe." Art makes that moment of "safety" more enduring. Yet in the next breath she qualifies "the beautiful" as "our whitest lie." white because of its benevolence, a lie because its orders do not represent the realities of erosion. Art gives us a way of looking at the world, allows us to see the hunt itself as design—the quail's role that of "prey." The "ancient tree their eyes map out" is the tree of Eden (symbol of our erosion from the ideal) as well as the tree on which the quail are perched in the tapestries. In response to the Fall we slaughter the quail but also preserve them as decorative feast, as art:

         the quail are woven
      into tapestries, and, stuffed
      with cardamon and pine-nuts
 
      and a sprig of thyme.

The sprig of thyme is our memento of our fall, our temporality, marked within atemporal form. The tapestry artist holds these paradoxes "in solution, unsolved," unlike the hunter who would possess and destroy.

More often Graham's stitching metaphor connects with her imagery of clothing, with the idea of a numinous center within or behind the aesthetic pattern. Art is not only an ordering of images but a shroud of the infinite; its surface is arranged around a vanishing point. Graham returns repeatedly to the metaphor of the garment which wraps the eternal invisible. Whether "the invisible" is itself an effect of art rather than a separate reality is not a question Graham raises in Erosion, though many poems in the volume invite it.

"Kimono" combines the ideas of art as design and as garment. The fluency and pictorial richness of fabric allow Graham to imagine the world of erosion in an aesthetic space. Stitched in visual delight with "valleys, clear skies, / thawing banks / narcissus and hollow reeds," the kimono's fabric represents our knowledge of the world. A boy depicted in this garden becomes our innocence, in which we mistake our knowledge for reality: "It means the world to him, this flat / archaic fabric / no weather worries." But formed into a garment, this limited knowledge becomes art and suggests something real and whole within it. The poet, wearing the kimono, identifies herself with a permanent spirit of the world that moves it:

         What he sees,
     in my garden, is the style
         of the world
     as she brushes her hair
         eternally beyond
 
     the causal crumbling forms
         of boughs.

If the world is a kimono, erosion is the "style / of the world" where "reeds are suddenly / ravines" but not its essence. Something whole stands "eternally beyond" it as well, which we may glimpse through the "open door" of the shifting "green scrim." It is "late" in the evolution of our knowledge, the poet tells us often, for any transparency of truth. Yet even in this lateness, the human spirit, "a sacred store / of dares," glimpses the disrobing of nature, the disclosure of a unifying presence.

What makes this vision "late" and modernist rather than romantic is the self-conscious mediation of art. It is art, not nature, that allows us this glimpse into the whole. As a work of art, this fabric, this "beautiful lie," can wrap a "reality" which is an otherwise unknown "something"—its mystery. It is not our knowledge of the world but our knowledge transfigured as garment, our world transfigured as art, with its "abstract" branches, that allows, even intends, the glimpse suggested at the end of the poem into "something most whole," beyond erosion. Indeed, that "something" may only have identity through art.

The poet, through the metaphor of the kimono, gives herself a privileged position. She is caught in the "archaic fabric" like the boy but also takes the position of the object beheld, the spirit-woman inside the aesthetic surface. The switching pronouns, in which "I'm / wearing valleys" and "she brushes her hair" coincide in the subject, suggest a double stance of penetration and disclosure. Again the artist affirms the reality beyond art's "archaic fabric" only by positing that reality within art, as a place of unveiling.

In "Kimono" Graham apparently follows a traditional romantic paradigm of male consciousness as desire toward veiled female nature. She modernizes this paradigm by showing how art fosters it. And without subverting this paradigm she does complicate it by shifting her identity from object to beholder. In Graham the icon as clothed female figure represents a reciprocal aspect of art in which the beholder "going in" experiences a sense of mystery yielding itself, without a complete consummation. In "San Sepolcro," about Piero della Francesca's image of the laboring virgin, the aesthetic mediation is explicit and the paradigm of vision as male desire is more clearly transfigured. But this basic reciprocity in the figure remains. This poem about a monumental work of art (conveyed in humble language) opens the volume Erosion, suggesting that the mediation of iconic representation controls many of the poems in their understanding of the relationship between the body and the spirit.

"San Sepolcro" again works with a contrast between the world outside and the more private, contemplative space of iconic representation. And again the representational space is associated with penetration and disrobing. But here art is not merely a matter of male desire extended by an inexhaustible, yielding female image. The sexuality implicit in "Kimono" (where the peeping Tom climbs the "gentle limbs" of a tree and observes nature as she "loosens her stays") is displaced by a metaphor of birthing. Graham is "one of the living," Mary a symbol of the mind's power to conceive eternity beneath the temporal, the "blue … mantle of weather"—thus partaking of both male and female mythology. Male and female stereotypes (penetrating mind and desired object) are transcended. The beholder-self of the poet is a transparent vessel ("snow having made me / a world of bone / seen through to"), but also active ("I can take you there"), enabled by this receptivity. This structure is repeated in the presentation of Mary, whose figure paradoxically unites immaculate male mind ("How clean / the mind is, // holy grave. It is this girl") and female body waiting "to go into // labor." Mary's dress represents the threshold nature of the icon itself.

"San Sepolcro" begins with an invitation to move from the outside temporal world into, first, the interior world of the walled house, then to a picture whose colors evoke an idea of eternity. Thus again an apparent narrowing into limits allows for a sense of expansion. Graham opens like a tour guide but, in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop, goes on from the literal to the symbolic, and hence to the beautiful and the mysterious, from the profane ("Etruscan") place of San Sepolcro (with its assembly lines and open-air markets) to the elusive, undefined, "sacred" space of art, from the public to the private. The pivotal figure is the rooster, Christian symbol of betrayal and sacrifice, who stands between the world of "mist outside the walls," the unclear world of erosion, and the disclosure of the icon, "before the birth of god." Just here Graham defines the limits, the "tragedy" of art, which awakens in the beholder a desire for presence. The icon is not an incarnation; the "still moment" is "forever stillborn." "The living," approaching the icon, "go in" but never "arrive." Yet art's power to awaken our thoughts of the infinite insures its hold on us:

      but going in, each breath
          is a button
 
      coming undone, something terribly
          nimble-fingered
      finding all of the stops.

The model of veiled female as icon arises once more in "At the Exhumed Body of Santa Chiara, Assisi." She is "pure even after a ton of dirt," in the world of erosion but not of it. Again the model of contemplation is one of desire forestalled. The poet's own worldly desire ("whether I leave him / or not") is delayed, as was the worldly desire of the earthly Chiara ("So and so you loved, / so and so you left"). These are left to the world of disappearances, replaced by a spiritual desire, a "deep[er] delay" in the contemplation of "nowhere" marked by the clothed, iconic figure.

Graham views the exhumed body of Santa Chiara, "queen of the chiaroscuro," almost as a work of art, a figure dark against a background of contemporary "blue." "Blue over your body in its afterlife / on its back in its black dress with gold trim." The phenomenon of Chiara's exhumed body is itself parallel to the phenomenon of art "as if the flesh were the eternal portion after all." This is not a Christian but a modern notion of the icon, recalling Wallace Stevens's secular reversal: "Beauty is momentary in the mind—The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal." Graham, too, approaches art as a means to approach the infinite rather than escape the body. The reciprocity of the icon rests in the paradox of the veil placed "in order / to be seen."

In Erosion, I have argued, Graham treats the icon as a form of rescue from the flux and as a veil which shrouds but also discloses the infinite. Her constant return to Christian images and subjects reveals an important analogy. But her secular treatment of these subjects also reveals a distinctly modernist cast to the analogy, one which erases ideas of transcendence to a spiritual other realm. Art itself becomes the redeemer, though the terms of redemption are not in arrival but in the "going in." Eternity is redefined so that it is bound to the earthly ("beneath motion, more flesh") even as it is released from flux.

Two of Graham's ecphrastic poems, "At Luea Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body" and "Masaccio's Expulsion," make this shift from Christian to modernist iconicity especially clear. Graham's return to the rhetorical strategy of ecphrasis emphasizes the aesthetic nature of the "nowhere" which absorbs her meditation.

The figures resurrected in Signorelli's painting are not raised by God but by art, drawn up "into the weightedness, the color, / into the eye / of the painter," and hurry toward "distance" and "perspective," the limitations of human time-space defined in terms of painting. The notion that these figures never wholly arrive, that "there is no entrance, only entering," itself derives from the experience of painting rather than from the painting's illusion and its Christian promise of resurrection. The still moment of figures caught in action and held into that action is never complete. There remains an inherent "gap," to use Graham's favorite word, between the painting and presence, between representation and desire.

Signorelli's frescoes, of which "The Resurrection" (the emphasis on "the body" is Graham's addition) is one of several at the cathedral in Orvieto, represent the pinnacle of his career. Graham has captured in this poem the central power of motion and bodily impact which is often celebrated in his work. She begins her poem by focusing the reader's attention immediately on the dramatic subject of the bottom half of Signorelli's fresco—bodies rising from openings in the earth, transformed from skeletons to fleshed figures:

      See how they hurry
          to enter
      their bodies,
          these spirits.
 
      ..........
 
          From above
#x00A0;     the green-winged angels
          blare down
#x00A0;     trumpets and light. But
          they don't care,
      they hurry to congregate,
          they hurry
      into speech, until
          it's a marketplace,
#x00A0;     it is humanity.

It is not quite true that the figures in Signorelli's fresco ignore the angels above them (who make up the top half of the fresco and are considerably larger and more prominent than the human figures). Many gaze in awe and ecstasy at these figures. But it is their resumption of human activity—dancing, bartering, debating—that interests the poet. "Hurry" is a key word for Graham, used six times in this poem and denoting our temporal nature (its paired term is "delay," involving the gap between our temporal natures and the eternal dimension we desire, the dimension opened by art). Art holds that hurry in its still moment.

By shifting from subjects to beholders Graham makes an important qualification to her idealization of art's beautiful lie, the same qualification she makes in "San Sepolcro," where the desire for arrival, for presence of the infinite (the birth of God), meets "tragedy." (The "at" in the title "At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body" emphasizes, as it does in "At the Exhumed Body of Santa Chiara," the threshold between history and art.) Unlike the Christian believer, Graham, as beholder of the icon, recognizes no "arrival," no complete presence. The ecphrastic poet fails by definition, as she yearns to approach the condition of presence evoked by the visual icon. For Graham this verbal/visual difference simply reveals the inherent limits of art to provide the arrival we yearn for. Thus "there is no entrance, / only entering," addressed to the figures in Signorelli's paintings as they "hurry" into representation, applies reciprocally (as it did in "San Sepolcro") to the condition of the beholder before the visual image.

Graham's next major shift in the poem is to the artist himself and his creative process. Whereas the figures in "The Resurrection" depicted the "hurry" of our temporal natures, the emphasis here is on patience and slowness. That patient penetration of the "wall / of the flesh" (like the opening garment in "San Sepolcro") is demonstrated in Signorelli's practice of studying anatomy through autopsy. This literal breaking into the body in search of "arrival," in search of its essential aspect, yields to a transformation from the fleshly to the iconic where it becomes inexhaustible, where "the flesh / opens endlessly, / its vanishing point so deep / and receding // we have yet to find it." This absorption in the flesh as icon has a counterpart in a movement "from the symbolic" (where the flesh might simply serve to convey an unearthly message) "to the beautiful" (where the flesh is itself cast in an eternal dimension).

This idea of the "beautiful" defines the redemptive character of art, counterpoint to the "tragedy" of elusive presence. Graham may have drawn from Vasari the apocryphal anecdote of Signorelli painting the body of his dead son. Vasari suggested that the son was the model for the pietà in "The Deposition"; actually Antonio probably died of the plague, and it is unlikely that Signorelli used his body as a model. But the legend suits Graham's vision of the redemptive power of art. Signorelli's act of drawing his dead son is implicitly parallel to the resurrection depicted in his famous fresco and described in the first part of the poem. But it is not the resurrection of the dead son so much as of the bereaved artist that we are left with, for Signorelli's mind enters the "open flesh" just as the spirits hurried into their bodies in his picture:

     It took him days
         that deep
     caress, cutting,
         unfastening,
 
     until his mind
         could climb into
     the open flesh and
         mend itself.

Like Bruna cutting and sewing in "To a Friend Going Blind," Signorelli forms, from the broken flesh, an icon, the shape which will rescue him if he puts it on. Visual art, more than poetry, involves this pursuit of the timeless through an immersion in the body.

"At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body" concerns a reciprocal need: the body's need for art to lift it out of the world of erosion, the mind's need for the body, for embodiment of its idea of the infinite. We see a similar compensatory and reciprocal principle at work in Graham's poem "Masaccio's Expulsion." The poem describes one in a continuous series of frescoes Masaccio painted in Florence, arranged so that the Expulsion clearly leads into the other images of biblical history, to which the poem alludes collectively. As in "Resurrection," Graham emphasizes the pictorial nature of the space as well as the illusion of reality. The poem begins with the grief of the figures and the common notion that the condition of representation is a fall, a loss of presence:

      Is this really the failure
          of silence,
      or eternity, where these two
          suffer entrance
      into the picture
      plane[.]

The poem goes on to revise this negative judgment. Like Keats's "still unravished bride of quietness," art is not the failure of silence but the triumph of the visual. Graham goes on to find in the world of the paint, not just of the illusion, certain compensatory features. Having lost presence and immortality, these figures emanate their loss, and this "price" can "live forever" as art.

Graham begins with the figures of Adam and Eve refusing sight: "a man and woman / so hollowed / by grief they cover / their eyes / in order not to see." But the poet's position depends on looking, and her poem is, as it goes on, an appeal to redemptive features of sight. Art makes a "garden" of this fallen world, this "inexhaustible grammar" of history, "its dark and light" objects and shadows. This space of the "picture / plane" represents a narrowness in which the fullness of live being is reduced to "symbols, // balancing shapes in / a composition," yet art provides a compensation for the loss of freedom it represents, a commemorative and aestheticizing power that rises up out of these limits. The pivot of this compensatory view is not in the central, symbolic subject matter of the frescoes but, as in "The Lady and the Unicorn," in a decorative detail:

            And perhaps
       it is a flaw
 
     on the wall of this church, or age,
       or merely the restlessness
     of the brilliant
       young painter,
     the large blue bird
       seen flying too low
     just where the trees
       clot.

This bird, "the gift of / the paint," appears on the fresco as a wing-like blotch at the edge near Eve's thigh, incomplete as a bird shape but close enough for Graham to figure it as such. It becomes her image of the imagination, driven to seek form, to enter "a space too small / to fit in" but also hovering above that space.

That narrowing into embodiment has a reciprocal effect of expansion on the beholder. Graham's eye moves down from Adam and Eve to various figures "in the foreground" (more central in the alcove) who represent biblical history. But their pictorial power in "the gold air" of art raises them from their passage into the narrowness of history:

     There isn't a price
        (that floats up
     through their miraculous
        bodies
     and lingers above them
        in the gold air)
     that won't live forever.

Art assures this immortality and causes the figures to "float up" from history and form. It provides the countermotion to the down-ward glance of Adam and Eve and the general lines of the fresco they occupy.

In the poems described above Graham affirms the triumph of the beautiful, the power of the aesthetic to raise the spirit above not only the flux of history but also the weight of symbolism, the mere interpretation of history. But as Graham turns her attention to art of the modern age and to the pressures of modern history, she begins to approach aesthetic value with more uncertainty. The weight of modern history carries a moral imperative that is hard to reconcile with aesthetic pleasure or notions of art's "beautiful lie" against time. While such issues revise Graham's thoughts about the role of the icon, however, they do not finally change her faith in its value or understanding of its structure.

The beholder in "Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt" brings to the fin de siècle works a knowledge of subsequent history which she cannot help but impose on what she views (history is not, here, "hopelessly even"). She uses the juxtaposition of two paintings as if to corroborate her own archaic vision. Behind the idealized icon, a space of eternal beauty, lies a scream, the juxtaposition seems to say. Yet such an unveiling is by itself too simple; it is the relation between the veil and what lies behind it, the relation of desire, that interests Graham and determines the value of the aesthetic for her.

The first painting is a landscape, a "buchen-wald," or beech forest. Klimt painted a number of such landscapes, which expressed his spiritually and sexually symbolic vision in a network of prominent verticals and high horizontals. Gustav Klimt by Alessandra Comini is the probable source of many details in "Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt." Comini describes "Beech Forest I" as a "rhythmic grouping of elemental verticals and horizontals." The beholder's vision of the landscape stands between Klimt and twentieth-century history, so that his meaning-saturated environment takes on the meanings that postdate it, in which the term "buchen-wald" is forever blighted. Graham introduces the issues that have concerned her throughout the book—the aesthetic transformation of "flaws" into "the beautiful":

     Although what glitters
        on the trees
     row after perfect row,
        is merely
     the injustice
        of the world,
 
     the chips on the bark of each
        beech tree
     catching the light, the sum
        of these delays
     is the beautiful, the human
        beautiful,
     body of flaws.

The "injustice / of the world" is very broadly defined here as erosion itself because the word "buchen-wald" has not been introduced. Despite the opening disclaimer, the poem clearly presents the world depicted, the world of erosion—"leafrot," "mottled shadows." "broken skins"—caught in art, as evoking an elusive ideal of "something to lean on / that won't / give way." "The dead / in their sheer / open parenthesis" at this point simply stand as a contrast of the mortal world to the abidance of landscape and art. But these "dead" are the victims not only of our mortal but of our moral nature—the anonymous dead of the Holocaust, for whom the trees soon stand as symbols, not opposites. The continuities of landscape and art, and the aesthetic balance achieved in art, come into tension in the poem with the poet's knowledge of human brutality, the weight of the word "buchen-wald." For the post-Holocaust observer "late / in the twentieth / century," the yellow light is a "gaseous light." But against this view the poet holds out another, amoral view, inaccessible to her but embodied in the beautiful landscape, where

     To receive the light
       and return it
 
     and stand in rows, anonymous,
       is a sweet secret.

The air, like the male gaze, would penetrate this mysterious image of the trees, with "little hooks" that "poke," anticipating the pornographic image in the second painting. The "sweet secret" of the trees is, of course, their inhumanity, their innocence of history, the idea of the infinite they embody.

Graham's poem may in one sense describe a transformation in seeing from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, in which the idealization of the landscape is no longer possible and an unveiling of the moral horror beneath the masks of aestheticism is inevitable. But I think Graham's vision, and her view of art in particular, is too complex for this simple contrast. The beautiful holds its place, drawing us into mystery.

The tension between the moral and the aesthetic and the aestheticizing of the moral comes to a focus in the second half of the poem, in which Graham considers a very different painting by Klimt, an incomplete, pornographic rendering of the female body, clothed only in a transparent garment. The woman's genitalia form a "mouth" "something like / a scream." Her facial expression remains "bored, feigning a need / for sleep." For Klimt she is a figure of Freudian desire and repression, for Graham a figure perhaps of public indifference to the known horror of fascism.

Certainly the "scream" Graham identifies with this mouth establishes the parallelism between the two paintings through the idea of a violence beneath tranquil surfaces. The major interest of the poem, however, is not in the genital "mouth" (or the issues it raises about the male gaze in Western art), or in the bored face of the woman (with its political implications). Graham's central interest is, as always, in the garment, which is not merely condemned as the cover up for brutal obscenity. "The fabric // defines the surface,/the story, / so we are drawn to it."

Graham directly compares the "feathery garment" that Klimt had begun to paint over the figure to his rendering of landscape in the other painting, describing "its blues / and yellows glittering / like a stand // of beech trees." She remains ambiguous about how we are to evaluate this analogy or the placement of the garment itself. But the resemblance of this garment to other images of clothing in Graham suggests that she approves of it. Through the garment of art we glimpse what is otherwise unrepresentable.

But rather than pursue this metaphor (garment/story), Graham abruptly returns to the first painting by Klimt: "In // the finished painting / the argument / has something to do / with pleasure." In one sense the juxtaposition of the two paintings, weighted in favor of the unfinished one and the Holocaust allusion, turns pleasure into decadence or even cruel obscenity. Yet that "surface tension / which is pleasure" (in "In What Manner") "holds / the self // afloat" and draws us toward the unknown and unspeakable. Thus "pleasure" may become a vehicle of insight, beauty a route to unfathomable truth (whatever its moral register). "Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt" is finally not an exposé but an assertion of the value of the veil. Still, "pleasure" stands as a highly vulnerable term by the end of the poem, as the "argument" of the second painting is inevitably grafted onto the first.

"Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt" repeats the erotic structure of the icon implicit in other poems I have discussed. Graham does not condemn, in fact she seems in sympathy with, this structure. The addition of the Holocaust imagery does not undermine this fundamental vision of art; it simply changes the character of the "secret" dimension of the icon and turns the promised wholeness behind the surface into an abyss. But this shift, and Graham's vagueness—which is not clearly ambivalence—about "pleasure" and elsewhere in Erosion about "the beautiful," may account for the dramatic change in her style and approach to the image in her next volume, The End of Beauty (1987).

For this ambitious poet each book is a critique of the one before. The very titles she has chosen map this out. Where Erosion imagines the construction of an integrated, centered eternal space set apart from the flux, even rescuing us from its absolute effects, The End of Beauty concerns itself with edges, boundaries, origins and ends, images unraveling into "minutes" and splitting into dialogue, the still moment dissolving into narrative. Graham has pursued this shift in recent work. Her focus is increasingly on the hurry of this world (this "region of unlikeness" no icon can transfigure) and the struggle to sustain a visionary stance within it rather than with drawing into a contemplative one. The darting, temporally unstable images of cinema and television rather than the static images of painting have become her gauge. Digression rather than integration is the dominant aesthetic effect.

These and other qualities represent Graham's move from a spatial, modernist to a temporal, postmodern aesthetic, one that subscribes less to art as artifact than to art as process. One needn't make a value judgment to comprehend the necessity of this shift for the poet (one needn't, that is, see a plot in her development). But whatever place Erosion may take in the evolution of Graham's work, its value to us as achieved vision will remain.