For Anne, 1963-2015
Untitled; MPW, 2020 (watercolor)
Apparition
Still you come to me sister
two or three times a week
in this blue water
as lifting my head I catch
the phantom blur of you
at the edge of the pool,
your body pitched forward,
waiting for the exact moment
I pass, alone as I am now
in this solitude,
my dull repetitive turning, arms mowing,
face down, face up, braced
for the briefest flick of something
like your fingertips
to graze my calf, right or left,
it doesn’t matter if you make for me
pleasure or pain, the imagined
feel of your nearness skirting my
numbness is enough,
wanting as I do what might be glimpsed
of you at the edge
where water meets
breath
(for Anne, 1963-2015)
Mid-August Garden View
This view of my garden needed some language, as did the quote below need an image (copied months ago in my sketchbook)–a quote which argues for a pre-language state of active contemplation. There are days, these past months (years), when working in the garden has been my sanity.
(“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perception, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before “in the beginning was the word”.” Stan Brakhage; fr. Metaphors on Vision)
