Still Life with Pitahayas, 1938. Oil on Plate.
J. J. Blickstein

                                                                                                                                                                                 for Frida, for Sue

Small skeleton with hands made out of metal clawing a still life of fruit, leaf and stone, takes the whole world for granted. The stone having murdered all the monsters we attack with festivity sleeps in the universe as a portal to origins where every action is maintained in a state of becoming until the mind blots the pauses into an assassination of sugar meat. But the tree, out of view, cannot die so we study the wounds and clean caves in the skull. Sweet little skeleton like a bone from a thumb on that dragon fruit with a savage blankness more illiterate than lust or rage, keeps gnawing the scene with the same purpose as if it were commanded by something more intelligent than the imagination—A little mechanism from the center of the earth, with a wire for a brain, hums to outlast the sun. Stop smiling at it as if it were your friend. What’s next, diamonds, the moon? 

Order in one world and smudge on the thread to the other, one march to a plague with a quarrel to determine a king of the world eats a plot with all its fleas. And the bruise on your hand is a waltz, is just ripe sugar beneath the skin. Dance with the little bones and let the stone be too heavy to invent more monsters from the black seeds, sleeping like minotaurs where cool flesh seeps from dream into a shipwreck—booby trap, death brought his friends: the earth, a long knife—you can feel the bird overhead hunting with its vision; The fruit turns slowly into something else. It’s like a family reunion but your not hungry anymore—mind with no thoughts, just the subversive irony of becoming all things at once with very little time, too much pleasure, and no ability to mend the transition.