Go, there—in this gloaming—fearless lad
Look, there’s Mom with a cup of flour and a cup of time, staring
into her blue bowl. And there’s Dad casting a line through yards
of streaming space with nowhere to go.
Hurry, but how through those twenty thousand evenings
where supper’s almost ready. It’s getting cool, so pull
on your red woolen cap and run through dried
fields with the black dog, Scout. —Just a bit farther now
up the hill as sparrows, startled from the hedgerow,
chatter in dusk, and look how the door is
opening, opening, and you are so
hungry and tired because the house
is empty, except for that long table with chairs.
Thirst
The wind thrilling our bodies as we dove into the quarry’s green water.
It was a sandstone quarry and from the very top you could glimpse
the skyscrapers of a distant city.
We drove there—four of us—in a red Mustang convertible. Danced
to Donna Summer disco and made it back to our beds before dawn.
If you trace the skyscrapers and buildings of any city back to its fields,
you’ll find a horse head down in the hectares of sedge grass.
Shelley and I leapt, holding hands then—hair slicked— joined mouths
in the water. Like others, we spray painted our names above that ledge.
The quarry produced decorative rock and headstones for the cemetery.
I gave Shelley a toy triceratops. She gave me a tyrannosaurus rex.
Here’s a pic of us by the punchbowl, a prom Polaroid now faded orange.
We wallow in time like that horse on its back in spring alfalfa.
I was waxing the floor when I heard she’d gone into hospice
and by the time it had dried she was dead.
A year and three states later, I ran my fingers over her name in sandstone
and recalled those stalled, ecstatic seconds as our bodies fell.
Once we sat on a cabin’s white bedspread while last flares of twilight painted the room.
The light seemed made of water and we drank and drank till our thirst was gone.
I think of each painting as a square in a wall
1.
There’s a will to the wildness of green, to become all grass and trees. The jazz
of being here. Friends and many others have passed now, so I make small 5”x 5”
paintings, all in tones of gray and white, the realm of dream. Here’s one with
a stick figure by a creek beneath snow-clad mountains becoming cloud through
the sun’s sheen. I think of each painting as a square in a wall I’m building. Here’s
another with gray sky over sea closing into one line on the horizon with a stray
gull. The water becomes light and the light water. Here’s one with a tiny face
between a half-opened door. I say, She, and a shine bodies forth.—Or this
self-portrait so pale gray it’s almost white. Who is this I? it asks.
2.
All this love and sleep—the faded dominoes of life. The painting I’m working
on now shows stones obedient in a water-filled vase waiting until someone
breaks it? —And the wall I’m building will never be finished. It’s as though
what’s true only exists outside of time, the way the distance between a glass
of water and the ocean is only the imagination.
Weight of light
In high school a boy on his bike was struck by lightning.
—Quick. His nylon jacket fused to skin. Something I’ll never forget.
The immediate dispossession in death of all we possess in life. A light
switch flipped until you’re coated in shadow. The Greeks
worshipped lightning. Invented by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, any place
where it struck was considered sacred. The fate of that boy
became a kind of truth for us all. Death as a final truth. The Greek
word for truth, aletheia. It forces being out of forgetfulness
as when the wet, heavy snow in April melts to daffodils, jonquils.
Or in October when the drying riverbed bears its rocks, tires, debris.
Before my father died he claimed that the furniture began talking. Father
was a sleepwalker, a sleeper who hides his sleep. The chairs, each said, Sit down.
The bed, Lie down. No, he said, in his dark gray strides, but that night,
his last, he left the back door and his bedroom door wide open. His idea
of sleep was a road, but I remember him most the evening before
as the blood clot was traveling toward his lung. He stood by the west
window and kept looking back toward us as he disappeared into the glare.
