“A Basquiat Premonition” is what happens when a poet can’t stop picking at the loose threads of art and history — the fabric of the poem grows and distorts into something more unrecognizable as each small patch of the past succumbs to its own unraveling. The poem ends with an unexpected halt in the present to remind us that there is only so much time left to keep the inevitable at bay.
Much like the speaker, “i didn’t know / how much warning could fit inside color” or, for that matter, a poem.
A BASQUIAT PREMONITION
after Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artworks
i was younger when i first stood in front
of the paintings and thought they were loud,
thought they wanted attention the way sirens
do, without knowing yet how sirens practice
grief in advance. the crowns looked playful
then, almost childlike, the way a child draws
power without understanding cost. i didn’t know
how much warning could fit inside color.
basquiat was younger too, younger than i am now,
and already painting skulls as if the future
had leaned close and whispered. a head split
open, words crossed out, a body counted
without tenderness. at the time i called it energy,
hunger, rebellion. i did not yet know how
premonition feels like speed. later, i would learn
how the body recognizes what the mind postpones.
how a city teaches you danger before it teaches
you names. how jazz bends because it has to survive.
how gold floats because it burns. i think now
about how the paintings repeat, the way someone
repeats a sentence when no one answers. crowns,
skulls, policemen, boxers, money with wings,
execution rendered holy. repetition not as obsession
but as rehearsal. was i ever more like those paintings
than like myself now, moving fast, believing endurance
was infinite, thinking the future was something
that arrived politely. back then, i thought art
responded to history. now i see how it sometimes
outruns it. there is joy too. children in water.
a boxer dancing. a bird balancing on currency.
but even joy vibrates, like music played through a wall,
like laughter that knows it will end. the facts came later.
the market came later. the body breaking came later.
but the paintings had already practiced loss, had already
lifted the crown just enough to keep it from touching flesh.
standing with them now, i do not feel nostalgia. i feel
something closer to longing for warning, for the chance
to listen better. paint does not predict the future.
it prepares the witness. the skulls keep talking.
the crowns keep floating. the city keeps rewriting itself.
and i stand there, older, knowing at least this much:
some art is not made to last. some art is made to arrive early
and wait.