OkraTonic

I lay prone,
in the silent woods,
the pale breath of night oozing from my pores,
the damp air steals my heat like a thoughtless criminal.
I am alone.

I came for the sights, the wisdom, the wonder of it.
But that is gone, now.
I am what I came to see.
I will never leave.

What majestic sights there were:
Magnificent vistas and hideaway caves,
wooded cathedral spires
and boughs of sundry moss and lichen.
But it is this day, unlike any other,
that turned the screw the other way.

I am alone, now,
pounded by silence,
as night descends
deep into the sour soil.
I am alone
under the loamy moonlight
cushioned in the spiney briars.

A staccato melody plays sweetly in the distance,
a lone soldier in the night.
All is quiet but this
and the rustle of new fallen leaves
as the homely band of strangers comes to pay their respects.
I have prepared for them a luscious feast under the stars,
in the woods,
of this dying rain forest.
The merrymakers take their fill
with no thought at all for tomorrows.

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I stand in the calm of earth shadow
in the blazing darkness of the night
while the seam of the star dotted sky
pirouettes in a serene stately flight.

Wonder wrapped in wonder
seeps into the melange of my conscious mind,
vague and distant,
as if in a dream.

Questions seethe upward
upon the precipice of ideas known well.
They yearn for glorified riches,
stretch toward cause and beginnings,
reach for imagined reward,
but they touch the veil of nothing.

As Michaelangelo’s fated finger points
but fails its lofty goal,
a creation so firmly rooted
in myth and war dissolves;

it crumbles to dust and ash
and gives no cause for gods and demons
or the panoply of vain imaginings.

But where beauty attracts the heart
to the finer curls of the painter’s brush
we yet crave the elusive object of our lust.

Like a firefly alone in a cosmic vault
we intern a septic but colorful past
and hope for more.

Through the burrows of investigation,
in the hollows of wonder and wish,
the firefly wanders,
and lights, no doubt,
as though with a cause.

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In a chartreuse unfallowed street
an angel strolls
wearing marigold sleeves and shoes rye and brown
wearing sounds of Wentworth
like a grandsire flocked in white.

From half-raised window pores
sweep wandering awed eyes
above pavement rain-spilled slur
where the saddened wings of street saints cry
for a domestic probate tome
in seamed skin worn true
and right.

Two friends should live this way
through middles and ends
a manifest of love unabridged.

This fire burns soft in a furrowed brow
beneath a feedsack cross-hatched throw
lightly spun in threaded rays
thrown by a window shaded sun.

To the chaise and settee wall abrade
so fair Picasso nudes
as the waft of old wood’s pride
rises steep in a stairstep brood.

In room upon storied room
Dylan, Yeats, and McCullers
accompany editions with letters
in prosaic sonnets and elysian dirges.

A book is parted to recite
in the faintest of utterances
a daunting memory retraced
from somewhere, sometime, or for someone.

And the portent finger conducts
the breaded word’s image
of love’s young voice

the we of me.

For to thee I give
for thee I become
one to each to one.

This entwined was true
that we had lived
robust in marrow
discrete of fear
to find the we of greater bonds.

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Blooming Peach Tree Field
24″ x 36″

Again, the blooms are in a hurry to get their work done. The same is true for the painter. There is little time to devote to meditation. Rather, the painter loses himself entirely in the work to the degree that the passage of time goes unnoticed and unworried over. And so it should be.

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Trailer and Church
20″ x 36″

Sunset on the trailer park, twilight and the lost love and pain of living, empty shells, and a church for their memory.

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Peach Tree in Bloom
24″ x 30″

One of the several peach tree paintings being made or recently made. With Spring arriving and passing quickly the painting was rapid. Buds turn to bloom and fill the tree, followed quickly by spry green leaves which overtake and subdue the brilliant pink flock.

These and a handful of paintings of an abandoned trailer park with background church. The trailer park series has become partly studio pieces, though begun on site.

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Of the words by a misspoken leader
where the obdurate eye of the owl
uncovers

the burrows of blunder-handed moles
in these poorly patterned days of wonder,
it is an utterance

common and trite
but one left wisely in the gutter.

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