3/13/12

In Landscape, Painted


Band with belt
Touch toes to sock
Have blue cup of coffee
Have red cup of blue coffee
Refill at free will
Sill at pillow, move
This is the day
To the outside, to the dew, abide
To escape this frame of sense and sentence
With hymn, name this smell lavender
This one fireweed
This one vine
Touch the hard of table
Find balance
Sidestep that spot of forlorn grass
That spot where the stars take their nightly shits
Sidestep also the waste of the moon
Stare at bricks
Stare at brick-colored bricks on the house-colored house
Stare at brick-colored bricks in the yard-colored yard
Stare at yard-colored bricks around
     the house-colored puddle
They are all blue
The color of brick is blue
     the color of house, the color of yard,
          the color of puddle
Is blue
It is maybe the lighting
It is maybe a reflection off the fence
     or the sky
Or the cloudy grey dew-inducing sky
Which smells of vine
Bead together a walkway of honeysuckle and pebble
Dabble it pink
Name this walk the chrysanthemum way
Dare not pause
Dare not reflect on why or cause
See a shore and its effect
The shore is a broken drive between humble yards
Ignore the fence that acts as a shore
     to the drive that acts as a shore
     between broken, cracked,
     humble yards
Dabble it pink to blend
Nothing is a sure-fire bet
Name that accidental shading a bird bath
That one can be a pigeon
The two shadings are allowed to look for each other
There do not have to be rules on what happens
     should they meet
Follow the walk to the gracile spot where hedge
     meets shore of fence
And tree
Or a man holding a yard rake
Or a blue man holding a blue yard rake
It is the lighting, maybe

You have to separate the shorn from the fluff
     to see nest of the grackle
And delineate what is wire, pole,
     and what is tree, cloud, sky,
          squawk
In this canvas everything is blue – 
     except for bluebirds and jays – 
     the house, the fence, the drive, the brick
          the shore is blue as a mandolin
     and the gathering of feeders
     is an attenuated sixth
     bent on becoming a fifth
The fence moans the bassline
The mockingbird apes the fence
     when she’s not patrolling the shoreline
You are drowning on the wrong side of the border
     kept at bay by framework you imagine
No horn of a sparrow’s tweeter
     now woof along the walk
Will prevent this
Catastrophe
If that is what you think it is, your drowning
The languininity of the landscape
     envelops the cacophony of the morning walk
     beside the blue fence
     along the chrysanthemum way
     that you have placed along this allegorical
          dark night, bright day – 
Everything is something else again – 
And now you cannot differentiate
     the blue man holding the blue yard rake
From a scarecrow protecting his flock
     like a herder leading his strays to slaughter
And what was landscape is now so much
     landscar and
Quartz

How we see in a kaleidoscope this scape of our dearth
     this pustule we have staked as our own
We claim our colors as we claim our definitions
     and we glory in the corners we create
We have given names to our temples and its claims
     upon our shores that cannot, must not
          be crossed
Rapid the rot on our lawns and flaccid
     the must on our weeds
But how well we adapt to the spot of rust
     on the post of the fence
     at the corner of our blue shore
          Is how we will live with this creation
     this shape of our birth
We can only know ourselves to the extent
     our imagination allows
     and all bent fences
     and all cracked shores
     and all broken blue yard rakes
Held by the scarecrows
     we dapple in as we see fit
Only temper our stares, 
     sidesteps
All the quixotic facets of our canvas
     are there to behold
To reflect on the stretch we give color
     at peace, at rest           (our scope is small)
               at bay, arrested in paint
For this moment when
     we touch line, drawn,
          and escape
     this current sea we haunt
The heart does grow old
     and stalks its own silence
     as cut glass grabs light
The hearth does grow cold
     and inhabits its own ash
          as its reason
Our shores will grow shallow
     the blue fading into the blue – 
Maybe it is the lighting
But it will be seen
     as shadow.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved

No comments:

Post a Comment