An Origin Story

I don't remember when I saw the blood, I know only that it came from my brother's mouth—he'd broken a tooth—and dripped onto the basement step, a kind of suburban aesthetic, red blood on a yellow cinder block, cooling in the conditioned air, found art in the toy-strewn underground, and the blood stayed there for years, may still be there, a thin tongue, and has stayed inside me as images will do, in this case as the wild of the body against the foundation of home, and later when I started looking for art and studying art history I remembered Blood On The Basement, the little cry against suburbia, the body's impasto, the way an image as Pound said can present an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, seeing that blood in paintings in text books, in paintings in galleries and museums, in movies and on TV, an accident of the mouth anointing an ordinary basement step, a confusing stay against confusion for a kid too early to know about artful rendering.