Untitled #12, 1981
after Agnes Martin
Agnes must have wanted me to see innocence or happiness
when looking at this painting. But all I see is the gathering
of pink at the bottom. For every woman, there is a man who
is nearby. Every woman has asked a tree a question. If you
ask a tree too many questions, it will fall down. You can hear
a tree take its last breath, it sounds like gurgling. All the
answers are in the gurgling. A woman just shut a window
because of someone staring in. I can’t look at the window
without thinking man. Or kidnap. Or knife. I prefer the words
of things I can’t see, such as wind, now, exist. Is it possible to
separate a woman from her life? For a life to just be a life? For
the art to be down the road from the paint? Just once I want
to look in the mirror and wonder, What is that?
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s most recent poetry collections are Tree of Knowledge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming 2026) and With My Back to the World (FSG, 2024). The latter was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and won the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), was longlisted for the National Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Chang has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and director of Poetry@Tech. You can find her at www.victoriachangpoet.com. (updated 4/2026)