“A good day’s work,” the artist said, admiring, as light drained from the sky, all the different blues of a lower sky renewed.
Above the tower, a deeper shade of blue. At the tower’s foot, the nascent grass grew damp with dew beneath the artist’s feet.
And so, to home, but not to rest. The restless mind plans on and on, the next day’s work, and after that, the next.
We who bear witness, our feet fixed in the earth below, cherish each moment, admire the paints as they flow. Time and space trapped in fragile things and the water tower, a watch tower now, standing guard, on high, watching over, mirroring, all poor creatures, set on earth, and born to die.
In the beginning the artist decided to start with the sky and work his way downwards.
He chose and mixed his paints. Then he climbed to the tower’s top and began to paint.
“Let there be sky,” the artist said. He masked his face, pressed the button, and refreshed the sky’s battered surface turning it to a delicate shade of blue.
The morning and the afternoon took up that day. When evening came, he packed up his equipment and went home to rest.
Circles within circles and wheels within wheels, the restless gears always churning, we both know how it feels.
Some call it a gift, some call it a calling, but we who follow the creative way rarely know the how and why of who pushes whom with what, nor when, nor where, yet still we try to scale that ladder, to reach that sky, and always will, until we shrivel, give up the creative ghost, and die.
Even the water tower frowns when I write ‘die’. Yet death will take us all. Tombs and tombstones will crumble and fall. Monuments, their words carved in stone, will fall sideways, perish, and die, their words erased by the sandpaper polish of wind, snow, hailstones, sun, and time.
Shall we begin at the beginning at the water tower’s foot where the itch of dried flaking skin is unbearable?
The earth worm coiled around the tower opens his mouth to devour his tail and the movement of his scales scours old paint in an effort to remove all traces of the former painter’s footprints.
Oh, the defiance of wind, rain, snow, ice, the hot summer sun, and the tower sweating year after year, erasing man’s efforts to control time and space with created beauty.
But now is the time of endless renewal, the sun’s return to renew the infinite cycle of death and rebirth.
“When I stand still and contemplate the path that led me here.”
I see purple arrows painted on the corridor floors their sharp ends pointing to the treatment room where the machine’s stark metal throat waits to swallow me.
I shed my Johnny Coat and lie on the bed. I mustn’t move as they adjust me tugging me this way and that, in accordance with the red marks painted on my belly and hips.
Then they raise my feet, place them in a plastic holder, cover me with a thin cotton sheet, and leave the room to take refuge in the safety of their concrete bunker.
With a click and a whirr, the bed moves up and in, the ceiling descends and claustrophobia clutches.
The machine circulates weaving its clockwork magic: targeting each tumor, scrubbing me clean, scouring my body, scarring my mind.
Comment: It all happened a long time ago now, but one never forgets. The desire to reach out and help and comfort any and all sufferers is still with me. This is the link for my book, A Cancer Chronicle.
“I work in a match factory.” “Do you put the heads on?” “No. I put the gloves on. They’re boxing matches.”
A golden oldie, still vibrant, from the Goon Show, BBC, 1950’s.
Your gloves are off now and they lie on the table where you work. How long have you had them? Fifteen, twenty years? Like good wine, carefully stored, old friends are better with age.
A second chestnut from the Goon Show: “Have you put the cat out?” “No, dear. It wasn’t on fire.”
And that’s another good reason why the water tower, and its full renovation, is so very, very important.
Bible and Water Tower, hand in glove: “And Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like any of these.”
Comment: A gorgeous photo, colors and textures, light and dark, from my friend, Geoff Slater, the line painter and muralist. He is working on restoring the mural on the water tower in St. Andrews-by-the-Sea, New Brunswick, Canada.
Mitla is a sacred burial place in the Oaxaca Valley. The caves in the hills above the town are said to lead directly to an underworld from which demons and devils emerge at night and by means of which humans can communicate with the souls of the dead. Mitla, in fact, is often called the city of the dead. Legend has it that if you embrace a certain magic column in the Palace at Mitla, the time left for you to live can be measured by the distance between your fingers as they reach round the pillar and almost touch. The pillar, they say, grows and shrinks according to the length of the seeker’s life. Petrus, a rock, in Latin, evolves into piedra, a rock or stone in Spanish: upon this rock will I build my church.
1 We walk on tiptoe round the garden peeling free the sunlight cloud by cloud
sometimes the heart is a sacrifice of feathers bound with blood to an ornate altar
petrus this rock cold against my chest piedra centuries of glyphs alive in your face
if our arms meet round these all too human columns what will become of us?
2 beneath your skin the woad lies as blue as this evening sky yellow light bends low in the fields below us each darkened pool a warrior fallen beneath the scythe
the moon paints a delicate circle its great round open eye stands out above the rooftops tonight it bears an eye lid carved from cloud
our teeth are diadems of whiteness we tie shadows to our heels and dance in triumph through street and square
3 daylight bends itself round rock and turns into shadow we flourish in blocks of fire
dreaming new selves from roots and branches we clasp each resurrection with greedy fingers will the moon rise again tonight and will we watch?
dark angel bodies with butterfly wings our shadows have eloped together
we can see them sitting side by side bumping knees at a table in the zócalo
4 church bells gild the barrio‘s rooftops our fingers reach to the skies and hold back light we draw shadow blinds to shut out the day night fills us with stars and silhouettes
we dream ourselves together in a silent movie closed flesh woven from cobwebs lies open to a tongue-slash of madness
the neighbor’s dog wakes up on the azotea he barks bright colors as dawn declares day and windows and balconies welcome the sun
can anyone see the dew-fresh flowers growing from our tangled limbs?
your fingers sew a padlock on my lips “Listen to the crackle of the rising sun!”
I just received this. One of my best friends reading Fundy Lines along the Fundy Shore. Thank you so much.
The Messenger
Clarity is essential now: the cycle of seasons, the will and willingness to change. Nothing can alter this flow: rain and river, pond and sea, the moon pull of the tide.
Each half-truth glimpsed through the helmet’s slotted visor as we charge in the lists, knee against knee, spear against spear, knight against knight.
On the shore at the earth’s edge, a new planet mapped in miniature: each grain of sand, a speck of dust, light upon the palm, yet the whole beach, in unison, weighing us up, weighting us down.
This world, immanent, renascent, growing more solid through its thinning veil of mist.
Freckled the water, as the wild man sculls towards us, over the waves, over the sand, a fisher of what kind of men?
Was he without guilt, he who cast that first stone?
The pond’s water-mask, reconfigures in ever-widening circles traveling who knows where o lap at an unseen shore.
Light bends like a reed. Liquid are the letters dancing, distorted, on speckled waters and the white sand undulating under the rising waves.
rogermoorepoet 