feellings
of
verticality
grafitational
guides
advance
&retreat
stability
surrounds
apearance
deceives
the eye
perspective
recedes
illusion
lives
breathes
spaciousness
intensifies
shape
AFTER SNOW MELT
Their burden shed, trees now svelte -
Hidden beauties in luxuriant fir mantles
Stripped, sunning in balm light.
Grass, spruce, stream,
Once blank and touchless,
Crowd together, tactile, seamless.
Tall knolls the Leveller had smoothed
Shallow hollows had smothered ;
Landscape has fresh verticality.
Waking birds fill the sleepy silence.
Skyful white replaced by blue vault.
God has lost his achromacy.
Her arms are open
Across the vast expanse
Heat patterns rise from flat rock
Simmering sensations to fool the mind
Blurring even the recognizable
Into a mirage of nothingness
“Dust coated winds that do not exist”
Blinding hypnotic colors play
Weaving patterns of self doubt
Alone in a misconception of belief
Solitude of unwanted fear
Emptiness worn on a sleeve
“Kaleidoscopic nightmares so very pretty”
Let down, shoved aside, forgotten
Discarded emotions piled in a heap
Broken sidewalks of those I thought I knew
French braided friends - or so I believed
Abandoned on my own crumbling foundation
“Why did I ever believe?”
When I see a tiny speck, (perhaps something in my eye)
Canceling the horizon’s verticality
Moving beyond invisible footprints
Solidifying a view - a smile, waving
As if a drunken crow has tipped over
“Thoughts turn to memories of words once spoken”
Reoccurring images race forward
Sentences of comfort find their way
Down the path to my heart
Realizing I now understand
What she meant - that day, this day
“I run to meet her halfway - her arms are open”
As if a road could be otherwise but geometry
defies the man who is lost on the road that
the trees want to reach and reach down
to his walking on
along a verticality that defies
the requirements of normative perspective
and so he will reach, and the trees against chalk—
the gesture of the arm extended is central
to all Soutine’s work be it a branch or an ache
or a split of the face, going off. In this case
can you say that a man is lost just because
you cannot distinguish him from the background.
first the wash from light white blue down to brown
That ugly brown from mixing all those colors
and only at the very base of it to lower the horizon
and expand the vastness of the vista
Then the slashing scimitar of curve
with endings in infinity
Twisting the edges through clouds
to show the torn tearing droplets
Then smooth in the white to capture light
reflected in the shadowed spectral essences
revealed possibly in a second glance
morphing into coils of twisted mist
He blinks and rubs a wrist across his eyes
Brush held in suspense above the waiting canvas
Searching through his caves of creativity
with a burning need to light the walls aflame
Why not a curving canvas
with folds and waves of verticality
There is no rule to keep this two dimensional
a moving light source could turn this yet again
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