She stares into her canvas, drawing
to her brush a blood-red droplet
of paint for another flower, her hands
delicate, as diaphanous as the wings
of a white butterfly, with blue veins
running a precious lace-like pattern
from her thin fingers to her heart.
She knew she didn't have long to live,
but death was uncharacteristically
slow in fulfilling itself, as she sought
week by week to finish her painting.
Not a masterpiece, I sensed, and
perhaps not even intended
to be finished, but instead a sweet,
wonderful journey of the heart, as if
retracing a memory-strewn path
back to her beginning. She paused
at times in her wanderings along the
sunlit path of that canvas, too ill
to leave her bed, or looking upon
the world from a hospital window,
the shadows of her death intensifying.
The last time she was able to paint
she seemed aware that her death
was near, and thanked God for the years
allotted her. She died several days later,
her canvas, her life, largely incomplete
but her true journey now underway.

*(For Dorothy, my painting partner,
who died Thursday, Aug. 5, 2010)

A fly, aware of possibilities
beyond the picture window,
taps incessantly on the glass
but cannot reach them.
The older I become the more
I feel like a miserable fly
at an impossible window. How
unfair it is, this aging process,
this melting down of tissue and
disintegration of bone and sinew,
this deterioration, cell by cell;
this loss of vigor and ambition.

--

In the night, in the darkness,
that old familiar steals around.
Emerging from corners of my room,
from the stillness and shadows
is a sad repository of memories
I can count on always to cheat
me of comfort and sleep.

–

He used to eat them up, wives that is -
sweet, delicate things who gave him
their hearts, three in all over the dark years,
destined sooner or later to look deep
into his black eyes and know the desolation
they offered, to begin comprehending
the cold chasm of pain to which their
innocence and credulity had brought them.

Today two of the former wives stood
an appropriate distance from his grave
and the milling stand of mourners,
immediate family to be sure, and those
who tried but could find nothing else
to do on this blustery day. The ex-wives
each scooped a handful of damp earth
and threw it with spiteful satisfaction
into the gaping mouth of his grave.
"Eat that", one was heard to say.

--

Snow fell deeply on the graves that night,
falling on both the wealthy and not so,
coating with cleanliness and purity all who
do not deserve and the very few who may.
The snow descended coldly and quietly,
blanketing gravestones and statues alike.
Distinguishable only by their shadows
and heavenward thrusts and stances,
they continue to designate where bodies
lay and bright hopes are finished.
Despite the softness and the silence,
above the solitude and endless white,
the boundless rage of ended dreams
seems to penetrate upward, to shriek.

--

The constricting walls reflect nothing,
allow nothing, it's simply the dusty
depression of a room within
a house within a failed marriage,
barren of love or hope of continuing.
Only a break in the tilting blinds
allows a razor's shard of light through
to the suffocating heaviness of the
room, slanting across the floor
to the feet of the man in his chair,
clutching the near-empty bottle.
The man he is now, a diminished shell
devoid of dreams and plans,
of sexuality and a passion for life,
can only long to be the man he was.

–

Fearsome dream: I'm cocooned below, facing heavenward,
          but my face no longer senses nor melts
the frozen snowflakes that once were my pleasure.
          Now those flakes swirl aimlessly, unfelt in the blue-black
uncaring night of winter, barely touching my grave,
blown about by the frigid January wind  -
          dead to those sensations, I lay hard, cold, slowly rotting.

--

Hear it, feel it! Above the live oak
and Spanish moss, above their
gnarled, grasping canopies, the
night wind flies savage and free.
Without constraint or direction
it inhales, blows, flings about at will,
tearing wantonly at primeval fears.
And higher yet, to the east there's a
cooper moon rising sinisterly, lighting
the way for wary night hunters.
Is it the howling of their hounds, or
the howling of that feral wind, or
something more I hear?
Yes, something more, I fear.

Such an eerie night on the bayou,
where fireflies pulse phosphor green,
dangling, dancing like marionettes
above jutting cypress knees. Along
the farthest bank, tip-toeing in mire,
a pale night-heron walks as a ghost,
dropping its head to strike, to give
final croak to some hapless frog.
Were crows awake on such a night
they'd caw and clamor and sidle up
to each other to see which could
provide the most reassurance
against such a dreadful night.
Latch every door, shutter every
window, light every candle!
The night wind is on the prowl!

---

If only he could paint what he feels
deep within, and not just what he sees,
his paintings would be transcendent.
But anymore, what he feels is elusive, hidden
somewhere beyond the descriptive,
beyond the stroke of his brush and the
complexities of his paint, beyond his ability
to put emotion and insight to canvas.

He's begun to question himself,
no longer the confident painter but now
far too introspective and unsure of his talent,
a talent that used to reveal itself with flare,
color and a successful style. Melancholy
has set in, frustrating any attempts
to get beyond the feeling of hopelessness.

Someone who would never equate
himself with the great painters, knowing
the limits of his own talent, he
nevertheless wonders - could this
be how Van Gogh felt in his despair?

--

Early on, we passed this pebble between us,
each in turn
trying to avoid possessing it.
The pebble
is worn smooth,
each palming it off on the other,
refusing to
acknowledge it even exists
so we don't have to talk
to each other.

After all, it's a tiny pebble.
A pebble of non-communication, but tiny.
Nothing to it.

Over the years the pebble becomes
a stone, albeit a small one -
more conspicuous,
more awkward.
The words between
us grow sparse, and if we do speak,
the words are sharper,
more piercing as we attempt to disown
the stone.

But by now the stone is a boulder, massive,
like some squat, ugly beast it has come between us,
pushing us out of our lives, what was our home,
the dreams
we were going to share,
the dreams
we would once talk about.

--

She walks as though she were a queen,
this woman who walks beside me - head
held high, chin up, striding confidently.
If she is a queen what does that make me?
I am no king, certainly not much at all
in my reckoning, but still she walks with me,
occasionally taking my hand in hers.
She must think more of me than do I -
how could I not treat her like a queen?

--

He was an elderly man, clothed in desolation,
a gray man fading into the stoop on which he reclined
as if he were already turning to dust, disintegrating.
He coughed, and coughed again the rasp of an ailing
man, a rattle vibrating from the fathoms within,
and he fumbled for his pack of cigarettes
as if to reaffirm his intention of dying should his
bottle of cheap wine not propel him into oblivion. He
was muttering, muttering secrets to himself, or of himself,
or perhaps proverbs to show someone, anyone,
how enlightened he could be there on the gray stoop
as dust and the remainder of his life swirled about him.

--

It's late autumn but the colors
simply aren't there for me. Leaves, trees,
the sky, my face, my hair, my mood,
everything has become pall and gray.
Everywhere that color should abound
there is only lack of color. This canvas
remains indifferent to me - staring
blankly at me. My brushes sit unused
and rotting in solvent, the colors grimy
and dry on my palette, a spider has pulled
its hairy carcass through black oil and
then white and died gray upon the
edge of my painting table - its web strung
at the bottom of my easel. I feel no more,
paint no more, sell no more, I'm used up.
"Colorless, odorless" reads this can of
brush solvent - it's what I've become!
I have become nothing, even without odor.
I'm completely gray, insensitive, consumed.
Looking into the broken studio mirror,
I confront the artist I used to be. My image
grows diffuse, without form, then dissipates.

--

You are banded for life -
marked and set apart
to be despised, hated.
The yellow stripes tell it all -
you're to be feared
should one get too close.
Only among your own
are you accepted,
and then but tenuously.

--

The wild geese overhead
follow their instinct, know
where they came from,
know where they must go.
They follow not the errant wind
but their own natural course –
so much more real purpose
than man.

--

Oh, the sadness in your beloved eyes, that
woeful turn from bright blue to grey, and
the callous years engraved across your face.
Dear God, but that I could reverse the slow,
methodical spin of earth and cruel time,
take us both back to when our passion
for each other burned hot and there was
no purpose in this world but our purpose.

--

Down from the icy Sawtooth crags
and through the winter-laden landscape,
the wind eventually dips to the canyon
and creek we loved so well as children.
Continuing on, it threads through the
hollows above the creek, sculpted even
today by stooped cottonwood trees.

Twisting above granite outcroppings
and lava boulders, the wind courses
through the giant arteries of this canyon,
passing among quaking aspen, river willow,
and gnarled cottonwood, shorn rudely
by now of every dryly-veined leaf.

At ancient volcanic escarpments the
wind bears south, scraping hard along
canyon walls. Upward it moves, out of
the canyon, slowing and sallying about
the hillocks, the gullies, the poplars
until it finally comes to stir ever more
gently, warmer even, my dear brother,
around your gray marbled headstone.

Primeval of days, this very same wind
blows for eternity upon eternity, polishing
and purifying even the roughest of
the earth's elements and impediments.
This said, at this hill's crest where you rest,
there is no need of further refinement. Feel
how the northern wind quiets for you,
as if it knows over whose stone it passes.

--

water’s edge
. . . briefly, the tracks
of a sandpiper

--

a snow goose
cups its wings to land—
curve of the shore

--

a ribbon
of starlings twists, turns
— this narrow road

It might be noted that I love
to write haiku about birds, in particular

.

autumn lake –
leaves rocking
in a trout's ripples

--

birdsong –
how it amplifies
the dawn

hospital visit . . .
the hush of snow falling
outside the window

--

old neighborhood –
even the memories
have moved on

--

waning moon —
the cricket's chirp
in a spider web

--

morning wind . . .
my sports pages delivered
to the neighbor

.

frigid wind –
a snowdrift and the dogs
at the back door

--

winter painting –
mostly grays
on my palette

--

warm spell . . .
the snowman leans
into the sun

--

icy wind —
the dead spider
spins in its web

.

a lone leaf
clings to the winter aspen –
my child's grasp

--

blizzard –
the snow goose
there . . .
or not

--

seaside . . .
the moon pulls away
from its reflection

--

winter  forage –
the crow pecking
at its shadow



.

Today I came across your fragrance, your scent,
for the first time in years, and I thought of your pale
skin, your *******, lips, the yielding of your body.

I always assumed it was lotion you wore, as if the scent
and the allure were unintentional, not a purposefully
and seductively placed essence, but simply your scent,
carried so appropriately upon the spring breeze.

Why don't I smell it more often? I wish I could. I don't
even know where it came from this time - some woman
on the street, or wafting hauntingly from a vendor's
cache of perfumes, or through the doorway of Macy's?

The memories struck me like a dull arrow straight
to the heart - I turned but you weren't there, nor did
your scent last for more than a few precious seconds.
It was there and then it was gone, just like you were.

I've obviously never gotten over you  - you continue
to linger in that special niche in my memories, waiting
for the occasion to leap sweetly back into my conscious.

--