Puzzle-painting (05)

An injection-molded tree is plucked for parts
dressed with concentric tricolored targets,
stars or crosses; if not, the olive-drab splotches
become the heart of the Black Forest.

A numbers-key can never be enough to go by.
To retro-engineer a thing that dimmed the sky
requires exploded views and many cheat-sheets
to make the finished plane hang by a thread.

They take the plane apart to re-assemble it
and suture the landscape in which it flies.
The customer buys a plane to put together,
this machine that dives in oblique bends,
crashing into a picture-puzzle’s stubble-field.

Die-stamped on a card-table in the cottage
lies another post-impressionist landscape
trembling hands maybe pull together, stubble-field
of horse-hair brush-strokes or a shady grove.

They took the place apart to put it together
before water wilts or sun warps the paste-board.
The makers want the customer to lose himself
among the parts to find them, put them together
as if the fighter-plane hadn’t been apart at all,

flying far above the crows or hay-ricks of Arles,
over heads of goat-men in Poussin’s meadows
or parks or wavy post-impressionist stubble-fields.
Imagery rained upon bleeds on the jigsaw pieces,
pointillism ruined by the color-field’s smeared future.

Better to assemble the place before it’s gone.
Someone has made this confusion for you
and it’s a test, they might say, of proper insight,
to figure where the hayricks or the sun might go,
places for each crow above each portion of stubble.

The plane that soars in air over-crowded with wavy
black wings and the mimicry of heat-waves--
fever informing the blue and yellow strokes
and strokes of coal-black standing for crows--
has been reduced to parts on plastic trees
the customer can pluck apart to put together.

A thread today suspends the fighter-plane
from the ceiling that mimics blank sky,
breaking into unrealizable quadrants for seasons
before water blurs the scenery or the glue
adds too many thumb-prints to the fuselage

for the plane to dangle from the ceiling from pride.