6×6’s
“I have painted these canvases as monks of former times illuminated their missals; they don’t owe anything to anything else than the collaboration of loneliness and silence, to a fervent, exclusive attention that borders on hypnosis.”
Claude Monet
They are like eyes these six by sixes
Like witnesses and drills
Going to the heart
They lack about-ness
Alluding to illusion in any case
They are gunshots and when fired well
Are true, when not, just misfires
Nothing more
They are love and caresses
Whispers to slow down on a frantic day
Shouts when sleepwalking
They are exclamation points
They are periods, but also
Commas and semicolons
They are prayers and slanders
And decorations
Winter walk
Ice needles the face dumb spreading a deep rose tattoo
I breath into my turtleneck Jughead style and
Walk the grim grimy avenue from midtown south, Village bound
Everything is frozen and it’s too cold for more snow
I stamp away the slicing wind
The light is diffuse and multicolored neon
Folding into a pastel infused gray smoke
Alive with storefront come-ons
Sounds, some muffled cozy lovers, felt and woolen fuzzies of comfort
Some clanking metallic beating my head bluntly
The ears and guts, but lacking clear origin
Coming from everywhere at once
Loneliness as cold as the cold walks with me
Keeps apace without effort
While under the layers of layers covering my unseen core
I am overheating like a star till at last I reach home
Once inside my face cracks its mask
Vibrating with the sweet transition of ice to water
Tingling itself warm and once again flexible
I love this feeling I think and smile
Or grimace, whatever the case may be
Painting
Such a fine-looking arc of just so many degrees
From origin to destination on the xy
So brief a comet and clean like a pistol shot
So clever in its articulation, so hot pink
“Good” I think at the day’s work and place a red orange
To quarrel with the heat
And then a pale iridescent blue to mediate this contrived fight
With silvery authority and a sheriff’s star
A wet blanket to keep it all under control
As if that was even possible
Glass
One senses the glass more than anything else
Smooth and hard where phantoms cavort and crash
Fusing the bouncing light into images that exist only in the eye
In the brain
The camera sees it though makes no sense of it
I see it of course and tweak it
Pinching the soft skin of fantasy into this or that
Embellish the lie with just a bit more
Or less here and there
Inside my mind’s eye the devils say look at that!
And I do and I photograph it and
Do hoodoo and voodoo to it
So I can tell you look at that!
And pretend all the while
It was my grand idea rather than my devil’s
I love the glass where it all comes together
Crescendos of light and color
Of moving things and still all reduced to the elements
Maintaining the illusion
That if you think about it a little
Reveals the only truth
Rosie
Rosie died recently. I went to New York City to see the Dekooning Retrospective and got a tearful call that she was gone. In the morning she ran around the house like the sprite she was, lay down on the couch for a snooze and poof. She wasn’t ill, just old though you’d never know it. She was the queen cat even though she was the smallest of the insiders, those cats, four now three, that stay in the house unless they manage to escape for a few hours. She was also the only she inside.
Rosie was a noisy cat, or rather a talkative one. She wasn’t content staying in the background if anyone was in the room. She wanted you to know her opinions whether you understood them or not. When it was time for me to watch the news or a movie on TV she took up her spot on my lap as if I was the custom made chair we’d ordered just for her.
She liked to stare into the fireplace when we had a fire going. Tonight it is cold enough to light a fire, the first this year and I think I will; I’ll have a glass of wine and say a silent and real goodbye.
I buried her when I got home, dug a hole and placed her stiff calico body into it. Now I have to get a tree as is my custom. Tomorrow seems like a good day to do that. I miss her presence, her noise, her sitting on me. I miss her annoying two cents.
Billy
Billy died on Monday. She had always been a thin woman with white hair and in her last years seemed quite frail. Here’s what I think I know about her: she was in her early seventies, she had two though maybe three children at least one of whom was addicted to some kind of drug. I say some kind because I don’t know if it was meth or junk and maybe neither. It doesn’t matter really. She didn’t talk about her kids. I also think they had kids as well but don’t recall: a function of my degrading memory or poor listening skills.
She told me when she first started studying painting with me (she was in her fifties) that she had spent twenty six years in bed reading. I assumed that she meant that she was depressed and read to have a substitute life but could have meant it literally. Billy was from Arkansas and her mother, who seemed to have some influence on her, was what she called a Holy Roller. Her mother denied science and had a fire and brimstone take on the world. I don’t think she herself had any religious leanings.
There was an ongoing darkness to her life because of family though she used it as source material.
Billy’s husband and I assume the father of her children, was a long haired biker. He dealt in gold for a period when she was an undergrad and maybe still does. For awhile he left her for a teen-aged girl who evidently liked a geezer on a Harley. She eventually dumped him. Billy told me of it in passing.
She’d drive to school in an old and beautiful (to my eye) Mercedes Benz which I think he must have traded for. She said it was always breaking.
I used to tell people that I thought that she had the most natural talent of anyone I’d ever taught. Added to that, thought that had she been brought up in a family that valued education instead of hell and damnation, in a place that had institutions of learning, and not had children as an extension of her “responsibility”, she would have been a genius. She was very well read and retained it all in spite of her background. She was inquisitive, argumentative and funny with a wry sense of humor that acknowledged where she came from and who she was. Sometimes it was dry; sometimes literary. She also twitched her nose when she’d joke around.
After Billy got her BFA in painting, she got an MFA in creative writing. She disappeared for a few years while doing so though I’d occasionally see her at art openings. After getting her degree in English, she enrolled in our MFA program in painting. Ordinarily I would have told her that she needed to go elsewhere since she’d already studied with me, but there was no possibility of her leaving town.
Her paintings were expressive, emotional and extremely painterly. They had a lot of the subject matter I have written about, Holy Roller stuff as if she was exorcising it out of her life. She would paint a bowl of fruit with the pain of her past, in lurid color and brushwork and did so with a sense of humor. I liked her work but wouldn’t want to live with it.
After she got her MFA in painting, the art department hired her to work as a secretary for the art gallery. Since she was extremely capable, at least in the beginning, she often worked in the front office as well. She did so for the money of course and the health insurance, but also because she loved being around young people and artists.
The last few years challenged her with some kind of disease. I think it was an exotic auto immune thing but could be wrong again. Before she died it took its toll and she kind of wasted away, again with a sense of humor. She reminded me a little of the snake oil salesman in the film Little Big Man who lost another body part every time he reappeared on screen, but never his sense of humor or optimism. That was Billy. Even when she recently told me that she had to start chemo, it was if it was a joke she was sharing, no big thing, just another annoyance to be dealt with.
I am told that she had been in the hospital for the past few weeks and that she died on Monday the 19th. I feel honored to have known her for the twenty some years that I did. I can’t say I’ll miss her since I hadn’t seen her often in the past three years, but at moments I will think of her and smile, visualize her telling me something with a swagger, a challenge and a nose twitch. It’s more like she’s gone off somewhere to get another damned degree.
Darkness
At times the shadows descend
Gently swirling ink in clean water
A cold curlicue gripping the heart muscle
Squeezing against the beat, stifling
The sudden pangs between one’s legs
At the thought of one’s lover
Other times it’s creeping gray
A dingy cast over the bright sun
Dreary curtains sullied by over washing
Faded by light and morbid disinterest
And boredom
For hours one feels transparent
Foggy; un-whole
Limbs are heavy as they orient themselves
Towards the earth’s iron core
Fingers ache and crackle
Irritated by gravity and weird magnets
Each step is a job in itself with a bad boss
Time passes, some moments unbearably long
Filled with waiting waiting waiting
But they too pass and dawn breaks
Coloring the shadow world salmon
And peach with a sense of humor
With zingy one liners
So even blackest moods
Break a smile
Monkey 1966
And just like that it was gone
My silvery thoughts
My mad monkey jumped
Swinging from thought to thought
Never quite alighting anywhere
Lickity split
The schizophrenic motor mouth within
Spewed his unruly nonsense
Put down his St. Nick’s drag bag stuffed
With love, unrequited and otherwise
With coal
Put down his monsters with green eyes
His fickle lust covered eyesight
And boy’s grabby hands all drool-y with want
Yeah just like that, in a moment’s flash
Framed by patterns of surgical beauty
Of colors not in anyone else’s spectrum
The annihilation of yes and no
Suddenly alone
Flowers
For decades he left a flower at her door
Every morning at the same time
Or as close as he could get to it
And then left
In the beginning he was merely a boy
He would wander the field near home
To pick the most perfect one
On other occasions when he was distracted or late
He’d pick the first one he came upon
The flower itself did not denote his level of worship
The everyday dance did, the picking, putting and leaving
And as he aged from boy to man to old man
He placed the flower everyday without fail
And she
At first a girl, a woman, then a grandmother
Would find the bloom
And smell it
Sometimes getting pollen on her nose
And smile, nothing more
For nothing more was possible
And one day there was no flower
Nor the next day nor the next
And the man looked out a window
Into an unfocused distance
Unable to any longer move from his seat
And grieved for her loneliness
Zazen 8/29/11
A dreamy state
Of sensation(s)
One after the other
From hair tips
To pretzel knotted legs
And hands nesting in cosmic mudra
Surrounds the stream
Of disembodied thoughts
Floating at once local
Then universal
And again local
Carrying images and memories
Pleasant and un
Wandering about
Nonexistent boundaries
Ignoring the lines of this
Ubiquitous coloring book
