Cy Twombly has died in Rome...

His style of art, for abstract painters, is so influential. His art can look like elegant graffiti, as he carves into white paint or a black "chalkboard" as if the canvas were marble.  Somehow, he makes scrumbled, layered, almost "erased" paint look beautiful. Twombly also is less well-known, I think, than some of his contemporaries, like Jasper Johns; he is something of a painter's painter, perhaps.

My husband has written a piece of tanka-prose poetry about Twombly:

Some Lost Dialogue from Catallus’ Leaving

Cy Twombly died yesterday — the great scribbler line-drawer smudge-maker magician.  Watch that circle going up, coming over, down.  Roller-coaster art.  How little suggestion a flower takes, how little influence a single brush-stroke makes: two dollops of red, yellows, greens violet, and white daubed on and you have the idea, the idea of a great bouquet but he drew no flowers.  A large red circle and he lay down for a nap.

speaks in infinitives,

undifferentiated

insides

where motives spring

origins of things to do

describing

to and fro trancelike

ebb and flow

you look in

just your running through

words

a few at a time

abandoning them

you look in

search for the plot

but there’s none

this fruitless searching

did you know

a secret

did you have one?

---Charles Tarlton