“Another long day but I completed the sky, then finished the wharf’s grey asphalt. Large areas are easier to spray with my air gun. It’s hard to paint them with a brush.
I also got the base coat on to the ever-greens. Much more difficult: I painted the inside of the cage around the ladder that leads to the roof. Fiddly work, time consuming, but nice to get out of the way.
No painting tomorrow, but Saturday and Sunday look good. As for Monday, I don’t know yet I’ll have to wait and see if it rains.”
“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.
Mayday, Mayday, S O S, this is a plea for help, I guess.
Dit-dit-dit- dat-dat-dat, the world lies dying and that’s a fact.
Add another dit-dit-dit and that’s morse code for we’re in deep shit. What can we do to get out of it?
Very little, as I see it, if the world can’t be bothered to see it.
Another half country of forest gone, right whales diminishing, they won’t last long. Rivers flooding, forests on fire, what have we done to earn Gaia’s ire?
Human beings long-forgotten, but profits are up, maybe that’s what’s rotten. We’re near rock bottom I would guess. Mayday, Mayday, SOS,
We’ll soon be gone our works forgotten. No more humans, the world in a mess: Mayday, Mayday, SOS.
Comment: Well that’s how I see it some days and this is just one of those mournings. Say it in paint, say it in rhyme. Nobody’s listening most of the time.
On a sunny morning, the sun lights up my bedroom wall. Each day he arrives earlier and earlier, a minute a day. Now days grow longer, a sure sign that spring is on its way.
As I lie awake, waiting for the sun, I sing my morning sunshine song. It keeps me warm and comforts me. I also count the birds that fly across the garden in search of sunshine and food.
Crows come first. They perch atop the highest trees and watch and wait. Mourning Doves come next and their dawn song is a mourning chorus, “Who-who-who’s next? called from branch to branch. With the sun come Chickadees, Pine Siskins, lazy Blue Jays, Juncos. These are all regulars.
Irregular are my neighbor’s Cardinals, orange and red, American Goldfinches, two small woodpeckers, a Downie and a Hairy, a Nuthatch.
Gone now are the Gray Jays, Gorbies, Whisky Jacks, those ghosts of the woods. Lost too are the Greater Pileated, the flocks of Grosbeaks, Evening, Pine, and Rose-Breasted.
They may come back, but somehow, I doubt it. For now, the Blueness of Jays, the Blackness of Crows, and an unsubtle dawn chorus of Caw-Caw-Caw-Caw-Caw.
Paintings: doors you can walk through, windows that open onto visions of another, more beautiful life. Deeper than the paint, the thoughts and words that formed them, brushed them into life, an ephemeral life, so brief that butterflies seem to last longer and flowers live for all eternity.
Transience and insubstantiality. Change is all around us, we are surrounded by change. But the deepest changes, the ones that affect us most are internal, set deep within us, death’s eggs hatching slowly since the day we were born.
Life is indeed short, and art endures. Carved five thousand years ago, in stone, this magnificent henge, first Wood-henge, then Stonehenge, majestic at the dawn of time, with its sarsen stones, pillars, post-holes, and labyrinths, circling within circles, a frail spider-web of sunlit brilliance.
Lost now, the message, as my own message is lost, covered by paint, though words emerge in the strangest places, allowing us to peer in through windows as long-lost words and worlds whirl out through carved and painted windows and everlasting doors.
Doors First version
Paintings are doors you can walk through, windows that open onto visions of another, sometimes better, life. Deeper than the paint are the thoughts and words that formed them, brushed them into life, an ephemeral life, so brief that butterflies last longer and flowers live for all eternity, or so it seems.
Transience and insubstantiality. Change is all around us, we are surrounded by change. But the deepest changes, the ones that affect us most are internal, set deep within us, death’s eggs hatching slowly since the day we were born.
Life is indeed short, and art endures. Carved five thousand years ago, in stone, this Towie ball with its labyrinths and circles. Lost now, the message, as my own message is lost, covered by paint, though words emerge in the strangest places, allowing us to peer in through windows as long lost words and worlds walk out through carved and painted doors.
The spider plant spins out web after web, all knotted together, then ejected from the central nest.
One landed on my floor the other afternoon with an enormous clunk. A huge new set of offspring and roots ejected and sent on a voyage of discovery to find a new home.
Mala madre / bad mother. Oaxacans have a curious way of naming their plants. I lived in an apartment above a courtyard filled with malas madres.
There was also A Bird of Paradise that nested in the same tree, a banana plant, in flower, a huge hibiscus, and such a variety of prize poinsettias that I could never get the varieties straight: red, white, cream, single, clotted, and double-crowned.
In the powder room, downstairs, our hibiscus is about to break into winter blooms.
It is covered in spider mites. Every day, I hunt them down, squishing them whenever I can.
My daughter calls me cruel and a padre malo.
I say ‘no: it’s them or the hibiscus. You can’t have both.’
I walk past the Jesuit Church where the shoe-shine boys store polish, brushes, and chairs overnight. I walk past the wrought-iron bench where the gay guys sit, caressing, asking the unsuspecting to join them.
Nobody bothers to ask me for a match, for a drink, for charity, for a walk down the alley to a cheap hotel.
The witch doctor is the one who throws the hands of all the clocks into the air at midnight, in despair. He’s the one who leaves this place, and returns to this place, all places being one.
The witch doctor sees little things that other men don’t see. He reaches out and flicks a fly away from my nose. “It too has lost its way,” he sighs.
I think I know who I am, but I often have doubts when I shave, rasping the razor across my chin’s dry husks. The witch doctor, my lookalike, my twin, stares back at me from my bathroom mirror.
Three witches dance on the waning soap dish. One spins the yarn, one measures the cloth, one wields the knife, that will one day sever the thread of I, who the same as all poor creatures, was born only to die.
You too must one day look in that mirror, oh hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.
Comment: My thanks to all those who click on earlier poems and express their liking for them. I am particularly pleased when an earlier poem lacks a voice reading. Then I can revisit it, rethink it, rewrite it, record it, and speak it aloud. Here’s the link to the earlier version of the poem Charles Baudelaire. Fast away the old year passes, and we must renew ourselves, our thoughts, and our poetry for the new year soon to be upon us. To all my readers, old and new, welcome to that world.
rogermoorepoet 