“Hood”

A room swathed in red, save for a grey path cutting like a cubists paintbrush through its center. “Please stay on the path,” displays a sign. The man steps forward, wary, entertaining the fear that the path might shimmer, like water, that he might fall in to its stick of color. That he might drown.

But the path remains stable.

There are boundaries here, hard and angled. The red tide meets the wall and shoots upward. The room is littered with tables, each adorned with a single rose. A basket of bread. Cutlery set on linen napkins. Everything  here covered as if a mobster’s blood has recently been let.

A single fox

 Grey.

The man stops, his hands frozen in the motion of walking forward. A still life. The fox has no eyes, or rather it does but they too remain frozen, unblinking. They are grey, with definition but no pupils.

The man continues forward, keeping the fox in his peripheral vision, unsure of its earthen or otherwise composition. He errs on the side of safety and tip-toes away.

Another fox. And then another. Some hang in mid-air, vicious grins strapped to their jowls like a jester’s mask. Their tongues loll. Their sinews flexed in kinetic pose.

He comes to the end of the path. There is a single door. He cannot tell if it is grey or red, though the distinction should be easy. But he cannot tell. Above it, there is a ledge that leads into darkness. Foxes pour out of it.

Above the door is a chandelier. He expects it to shimmer, but it doesn’t. It is the first chandelier he has seen that does not reflect light. It is the same matte as the rest of the room. Vacuous. Absorbing color into itself. Perhaps this path, these foxes were once red too, before the room drank their color. How a dragonfly bite might steal the pigment from the back of one’s neck.  

But the door remains problematic.  There is an outlet next to it, and the man wonders if it still holds a charge. If this is the reason why the foxes have fallen outside the currents of time. Or has time deserted this place? It too swathed in the sterile warmth of crimson?

He reaches for the door handle. When he touches it, there is only blackness. Blackness and the sound of growling. The sound of flesh being torn.

            My mother has been taking an abstract painting class. When I call home, she updates me on her progress. Last week, they painted a canvas black and smeared great gobs of other colors on top of it with a spackling knife. “It’s important to leave some of the black showing,” my mother tells me, her voice still a go to comfort like the tattered cat blanket my great aunt sewed for me or the weight of my dead grandfather’s watch. I try the experiment for myself but choose red rather than black. I sit cross-legged on my floor and squeeze the acrylic paint into a cheap plastic tray. I stir my mixture with a brush, the touch of black swirling through the red like car highway lights in a time elapsed photograph. I roll this onto my canvas with a pink roller that should have been thrown out three uses ago. As always, I fail to make a sufficient amount of color to coat the entire canvas, so I repeat the process, each mixture slightly different than the one previous. By the time I finish, the canvas reflects back a spectrum of accidental intentionality, speckled with streaks of dark bruising and near transparency. I set it on my windowsill to dry, and there it remains for the next few weeks.

            For about a year now, I’ve been chasing colors. Building rooms for them in the halls of my imagination until they overflow onto paper. It began with a man in a white room, the rules of the world surrounding him unknown. In many ways, this man is me and in many ways he is not. What we share is our placement in this labyrinth of color.  That we both learn the rules of navigation as we proceed. But our trajectories are our own. This word, trajectory, has haunted my vocabulary in my time here, cropping up in almost every piece I write. Its Latin roots extend back to 1696 and are feminine, trajectorius of passing, also traicere to cause to cross, and jacere to throw. Today, in our post-Euclidian world, the term is complete with its own mathematical functions, theories, and symbols and defined as the path a moving object follows through space as a function of time. For me, this word has become representational of where the inner and outer self meet; the crossroad of the world of writing and reality. It accounts for the serendipitous nature of information and data’s discovery at the moment it will mean most. Or in other words, finding a Don Cherry album in the freebox the day after you’ve first heard his spastic coronet. My trajectory here has followed the curvature of color. I have found that this is not an unusual trajectory for this place, and my explorations have been informed by professors and peers alike, each being drawn to their own shade, and each searching for their own definition. Perhaps this is what Michelle Naka Pierce means when she writes the phrase “symptom of color.”

            The fact that poets and writers are drawn to the complexities of color is not so surprising, particularly since these craftsmen and women deal in a medium that often describes the visual with nothing more than a combination of black and white. A line break is, after all, nothing more than negative space. An absence of color. That this phenomena is exacerbated at an institution that houses a series of colored rooms should be even less surprising.

            Maitri. The Five Wisdoms. Or Loving kindness. An open secret our community shares. Red, or Padma, like all five of the colors has aspects of both wisdom and confusion. Desire and indiscriminate longing. Seduction and manipulation. Self assessment and habitual repatterning. The complexities of red are often minute and can be as dangerous as they are beautiful. As neurotic as they are wise. After a session in the Maitri rooms, the practice of aimless wandering is encouraged. To go in search of the trajectory that asserts itself. Or is this the absence of trajectory? A journey without goal. Without time and space.

            I have yet to apply other colors to my canvas, too enamored by the complexities of red to mask over it. I still want to know what red sounds like. Where its center of gravity lays. And how to navigate its surface. But perhaps tonight is a starting point. A new trajectory. And with that, I would like to share with you a vision of red.

Another from the archives. Recorded on my mp3 player in Athens, Ohio circa 2006.

ANOCIVIL

People don’t want no civil war

All they want is to get some more

Throw those ideals out the door

I got no room but I need more

Want don’t you shake your chains and break free

You said it’s ‘cause they appeal to me

I don’t want no civil war

Hey didn’t ya hear

I want some more

Ipods cigarettes and cadillacs

I got my credit to the max

But hey boy don’t I got some flash

Three gold teeth now that’s pizazz

People don’t want no civil war

All they want is to get some more

Throw those ideals out the door

I got no room but I need more

I got new kicks and a couple o threads

So now I’m gonna go out and get blitzed

Gonna take this town, gonna paint it red

And take a pill in the morning for my head

I ain’t here

To talk to you

I’m just here

To get loose

Gonna chase some tail

Grab a caboose

And in the morning

I’ll say thank you!

People don’t want no civil war

All they want is to get some more

Throw those ideals out the door

I got no room but I need more

Kyle Pivarnik at the Poets Co Op reading series in Loveland, CO. 

Pakistan.

An oldie but a goodie!

Words and music by Kyle Pivarnik.

Music by Kyle Pivarnik

Words by Orpingalik, Netsilik Eskimo

In Blear of Night

Words and Music by Jason Calsyn

Caverniqua

Words by Jordan Antonucci and Kyle Pivarnik

Music by Kyle Pivarnik