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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

With the freight train’s dominance

The electric water laden heat

Ready to pop if anything is

Forms an immovable crystal curtain

Hanging dark gray veils and leaden lines

This is the fifth night in a row that the sky refuses us

The fifth night of taunting

The fifth of a brooding threat a little to the north

But not here

Promises promises