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Ocean Park

 after Richard Diebenkorn

 

It is the light coming through a window,

through several windows in a room where I am standing.

It is the light in Ocean Park, a park

by the ocean or a park that’s made of ocean.

It is the particular way the sand catches the light

and the way the waves change the light

with the different ways they move: first one light

then another, light falling on something rough or smooth.

It is the light over the dunes and behind the dunes

and on each curve of the dunes and on the cliffs

that I imagine loom over Ocean Park.

It is the light shining through the foliage of the park

as it moves before the window in the wind. No,

it is a wash of green with gold coming through.

It is the light of each hour of the day

in one room full of windows for thirty years—

can you imagine?—but it is not what Monet did.

This light doesn’t change a cathedral

or anything else. It is itself. It is light

cut up and put back together, the way a prism

or water or sky can do, yet not like that:

This light is stitched together with black lines.

Can I stand before this pink and say morning,

this wash of blue and say afternoon,

this orange and say only orange?

Can I stand in the room where he was standing

when he painted all this canvas filling

the gallery around me now like windows,

but not windows, though I can’t help but try

and make them like. They resist the mind.

They do not represent. But words, words—

no matter how you cut them, they cannot

not mean. You cannot just stand

in them. They are made of meaning.

They cannot be unmeaned.




Katie Herman

levelheaded: Ocean Park

 

The first half of this poem attempts to describe Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, a cycle of sizeable abstract paintings depicting irregularly shaped blocks of color in a kind of coastal palette. The poem’s response to these paintings begins with the phrase “It is the light,” which becomes a refrain for the early part of the poem. Light, as it intangibly bounces off a landscape or slides through a window, is the speaker’s way of understanding Diebenkorn’s large, geometric representations of place. Light, as an extension of the swaying angularity of those paintings, becomes a metaphor for the elusiveness of understanding. We can’t see light until it reflects off an object, and we can’t always understand what we see until we put it into language.

 

In that sense, this poem is an essay on the potency of imagination. The speaker has never been to Ocean Park, but from Diebenkorn’s paintings, she reconstructs “the light shining through the foliage of the park / as it moves before the window in the wind” and “the light over the dunes and behind the dunes / and on each curve of the dunes.” The speaker sees Diebenkorn’s lines and colors and perceives trees and sand dunes. More importantly for the poem, her interpretation of “Ocean Park, a park / by the ocean or a park that’s made of ocean” arrives to us through language, and because words are “made of meaning,” Diebenkorn’s abstraction settles into concrete images of real things.

 

This brings up an important and oft-explored philosophical question of modern poetry: can language extend beyond its denotative and connotative meaning? The speaker is right to point out that Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings “do not represent.” She is convinced that language can’t “not represent” in the same way images can. Again, since words (a passionate “words, words”) are made of meaning, there is a limit to how abstract they can be, and ironically there is thus a limit to what they can represent. They can’t, for instance, represent “light falling on something rough or smooth.” They can only describe it. Still, the poem’s final word, the recognizable but invented “unmeaned” (not “unmeant” or “unmeaning”), props the door open a bit. There is still room for words to grow and flex around the demands we place on language. There just a little room for language to mean nothing.

 

 

-The Editors