Friday, February 28, 2014

A Measured Room

The waters of the epic well up in my imagination.
Last year's lake is higher than this year's tears.
Now I address some modern art canvases.
Sanity depends upon an iota in Jackson Pollack's painting.
I am a formulated self who still has the need
to see something exceptional in print.
Stopped from drifting through the day,
I am made stranger to the ambitious one
of a few minutes ago. I will have to learn all over again
his coordination and his defenses.
Layer upon layer has been added to the original flesh
I was born with. I move between bodies
like a measured room in a Henry Matisse painting.
     My fitness has been earned like a bundle of firewood.
Younger modernism strengthens our newly acquired bodies.

What hasn't been done, all the yesterdays,
all the tomorrows,
I share this hammer with the world.
     Hand me the visor that shades us from fate.
I pry loose the nails to expose the decade of our trust.
The Transcendentalists are walking Emerson's intuitive dog.
The creature is on the leash of a great eyeball.
The faithful hound is busy perceiving all sorts
of unconditioned smells. My memory is great enough
to sense the bear on the mountain.

Organization, you win again.
I'd like to read your Hemmingway.
Jack Kerouac sits fifty paces from the porch in a birdhouse.
All the combinations of getting lost are calculated
in your beatnik eyes.
Take that little walk with me that quiets the mind.
The Moderns are finally finding their way into my life.
I believe they have finished little of what they had to say.
The canvases stretch out between here
and the unseen cheek. 
     I will not be reticent this time.
     My mask has slipped.
     The shroud has been found.

Encounter this place beyond attitude, before eye contact.
Hear the noise that precedes meaning.
In time one of us will remember
the two things that are important.
     The lamb abounds in the present.
     The objects behind the mist are known only to me.
Their presence within stone walls is the beginning
of all sanctuary.
     The tent in the desert is portable.

I am here in this human wingspan.
The drapery of the sky is soft against the difference.
There is a material that wants to wind our perception
as if it was a watch.
Formerly, I was a dude who believed in nearly
everything,
presently a babe who calms you with nerves of steel.  
The flame of Pentecost divides the languages into one.
Let's fathom one another for a while, yeah, for a while.
I stay restless in the hours of my flowering tragedy.

The Moderns evoke a substance that absorbs
the qualities close to it.
The catch of their canvas floats
around an upstart religion.
I am a stone's throw away in the renaissance.
The addition of myself to my aesthetics
is perhaps an accomplishment.
     Roads cross on a map like laces on a shoe.
     Contemplation is currency in a strange land.
I am a shy soldier who reads the rules.
I exchange rose petals for a uniform.
The uniform of rebirth is buttoned like a frock coat.
      

Friday, February 14, 2014

Two Steps Behind the Covenant

The primitive moves unseen in the wake of too much culture.
The Ancients would understand a Mark Rothko.
The Ancients have the mental and physical coordination
of human beings, yet they have no history, only evolution.
They can laugh, tell stories, and find shelter.

I am sorely devout although the day is longer than my praise.
I paint a little, and then the layering begins again.
My child is two steps behind the covenant
with evening measuring the field.
Her heartbeat is transcendental in the first few rows.
Her drawings are done in the service before the kiss of peace.

I can picture him in my studio, scraping the last extra
into the unknown.
I like the idea of sitting in a director's chair,
looking at the layers of paint inch forward.
I was right in letting you enter the room first
but wrong in letting go of the chapel.
I have tracked this bird through the rains that patter
on St. Peter's dome.
The king is caught in the paint, and I have to somehow
get him out of this room.
He gets as far as the collar of my favorite, red flannel.
I contemplate a god who paces in the edges.
The collective crush of compass points is also red.

The camels who carry our load have the best view.
The highway once belonged to us too,
but then the writers took over.
The story of John the Baptist changes on the evening news.
The wild men crouch in the desert of my escaping thought.
They fall short of my heart by a yard or so.
The scarecrows are now anchored.
The script hovers over the waters for the cameras to see.
     The readers are struggling on the staircase.

The copy editors are advancing in the age of newspaper museums.
The Trinity has been mixed into the columns.
The saying you are about to hear has been in the news
since design left culture standing in the dust.
Originally, there was one material and a matchmaker.
Corinthian guards plead with the merchants for more cloth.
Each object belongs either to thought
or a piece of the revolution.
They had forgotten his face so they did not know him.
The wheel of tribes progresses through the nations.

Friday, February 7, 2014

Unified Existence

Modern art is the body of an increasing awareness of who we are.
We are fields of energy. When we gather near these canvases
we begin to feel the polarity of a unified existence.
The Ancients knew it, but it was still in their laughter
and a landscape that was not wild,
only throbbing to speak through their stories.

It takes a movement to the essence of things
to see what they are composed of is not what they are.
There is an emergence of gifts that the Ancients knew
would together define their Odyssey.
They are still sailing in the ever changing ways
we construct the entrance to our homes.
We embrace a forest or a radio wave and long to cover
the ground that brings them into a single room.
     A leaf is swept across the floor.

All other objects become dependent on its captivity.
We stand in the evidence and become like Moderns
in touch with the objects flowing through our homes.
Others greet us, and eventually a painting is hung on the wall.
The non-objectified paint on canvas makes the Ancients smile
at the accidental collectivity of ourselves and our surroundings.

The ether of the church lets us feel comfortable
as a random collection of atoms.
Matchsticks are struck together in unison,
flickering for the same brief instant,
measured until it dwindles to a pinch,
and then held in permanent.
There are other ways we could be put together,
but we already have these gifts so why not use them?
There have to be museums, places where the fine mist
of silence can take on ages gone by.
The Ancients are speaking at the top of their lungs,
but we can barely hear them.
They are saying that's what I would have painted naturally.