☀ What Sparks Poetry: Eli Payne Mandel on “GORKY SUBLIVM TIXET”

I was travelling through a particularly grim part of your country when I saw this phrase scrawled beneath an overpass. Beneath it, the same hand had painted a graffiti mural in no way reminiscent of Arshile Gorky’s work—just a heap of pink and green bubbles, like forced cheer. Naturally, the reference might have been to another Gorky, Maxim the writer for instance, or one you and I would not recognize. In any case, the phrase has the correct grammatical markers to form a Latin sentence, but the words mean nothing. If we were philologists we might instead conjecture them to be a corruption of GORKY SUBLIMVM TEXIT, an elusive sentence that would mean: Gorky protected a sublime thing, or concealed it—or even, taking TEXIT as the syncopated form of TEXVIT, that he wove it. The point is, I arrived in your town and rang your bell at the appointed time, but you did not answer, nor have I heard from you since, and all my letters have been returned sewn shut like eyelids.