For unknown reasons I
was told I was going to
sit for a portrait by a well
known local artist.
It was a gift, so I had
little choice but to accept,
and so I sat on a chair
frozen in place.
I asked how long it
would take and he replied
“Not more than four sittings
and then I can go to work.”
I pointed out that like
a Buddhist river, I could
never pose the same way
twice, each time would be different.
He smiled and said
the painting would be
a Post-modernist
so my pose hardly mattered.
He is cornered and knows it
so he responds as honestly
as he knows how without
turning away his questioner.
“You have a basic choice, “
he says, “most likely,
and that is do you want it
to look like this now,
or do you want it to look
like this in say thirty years.
If you want it looking like
this in thirty years, this
is what I would give you now,
and if all you care about
is now, it will possibly look
like this thirty years out.”
He’d been asked the question
before, given the same
answer and he knew
the odds were good that
he’d never see this person
again. That, sadly was the price
of integrity when you are
a highly skilled tattoo artist.
You misunderstand me, he said,
I did not ask you to write a poem
about a flower, anyone can do that,
I asked you to write a poem with a flower.
Do not ask me what the poem
will be about, ask the flower, but
first you must learn to speak
the language of the flowers.
If you find this difficult, consult
the sky, it is fluent in almost all
species of plant life, mother to
them at one time or another.
When you have finished, cast it
to the morning breeze, that
it might find purchase somewhere
and sing its song to a new audience.
God sits at his easel, brush in hand
and thinks about the butterfly
alighting on the oak.
This man would rather paint
the nightmare of hell, but
he has been cast out and
his memory has grown dim.
He remembers being a small child
amused by the worm peering
from soil in a fresh rain and how
when he split it, both halves
would slither away
in opposite directions.
Now he rocks in the chair
and watches night fall
and shatter on the winter ground.
First Appeared in Medicinal Purposes: A Literary Review, Vol. 1, No. 6,
Spring 1997.
This morning the sky
is a painting by Magritte
as it is most days, no title
Ceci n’est pas un ciel.
The birds rise from
the wetland as Escher
would imagine them,
the small wetland
once a place that
might be painted by
Monet on a day when
he cared nothing
for water lillies, but now
a jungle of Gauguin.
We wait for the return
of the flocks as the sun
makes its retreat
and imagine again
a blazing sky over Arles.
We stood trapped between
slack-jawed and reverent
looking at the woman sitting
cross-legged outside the doorway
lovingly fashioning a pot,
her gnarled fingers gentle
on the yielding clay.
Others this day fashioned
rings and pendants
simple tools on silver
and one of a kind treasures
they would lay out
on blankets hoping we
would want more
than just a photograph.
Our day on the Taos Pueblo
ended too early, its
memories lingering
a lifetime.
Linking things is a human need,
tenuous forces barely holding
across synapses easily broken
or lost, never to be replaced.
Ithaca is forever joined with
Galway City, and I still have not
figured out how to get the two
people together as together is
obviously what they should be.
She sits at a small table
in the Commons, staring, waiting
perhaps for a writer or lover
who may be both, to come down
from Cornell and join her,
while Oscar waits patiently
on a marble bench, hat by his side,
telling Eduard of the woman
he expects to arrive, trying
to determine how to tell her
that her friendship means
everything, but it can be
nothing more than platonic.
In my world they meet, she
listens, fights back tears
and promises always to be there,
friends frozen in time and bronze.
It was Salvador Dali who once said:
“Have no fear of perfection,
you’ll never reach it.”
It might have easily have been
my creative writing professor
in College, although he would
have added, “and in your case
I doubt you’ll ever get close.”
Well over time I have
certainly proved Dali right,
although I’d like to think
the esteemed professor
missed the mark, but
as Cage said, Nicolas
not John, “Nobody
wants to watch perfection.”
The good and the bad of acquiring a new work of art is that you have to listen carefully when it tells you just where in your home it has to be. You may have other ideas, but it is best to set them aside, for ultimately the art knows far better than you. All you must do is listen carefully, and mindfully but devoid of preconceptions. And new works of art come with a knowledge of how those domino mazes are constructed, for once they find where they need and must be, the art that occupied that place is duty bound to tell you where it wants next to be, and so on. So gather up your tools, ladder, picture hooks and nails for this is going to be a much longer day than you envisioned.
Gertrude Stein said
poetry is vocabulary,
or so Simic reported it,
but in that case
what do we make
of Haiku, where
a poem at maximum
can use only
seventeen words.
Perhaps, if we
follow Levi-Strauss
haiku is not poetry
but art, for all art
is reduction
and there is little
you can do
to reduce
a haiku further.
an old writer and his words 