35

 A Morning Named October 7th (San Francisco, CA)

 

One last morning as 35

One part hollow mixed with two parts regret

One deep yearning for a year unspent.

 

Ambient

 Dear Hemingway,

(San Francisco - Point Lobos, 20 Sept 2019)

---

These days are met with bedlam

a malady of the spirit

ubiquitous, fluid form 

I wake to nothing

no joy to be found or known

I cradle my soul, fill her with the night's stars,

not understanding

loss, unwilling to delegate pain

only allowing these eyes to tell of the
weight she carries.

I venture to where the lands end, and I see an old man 
standing on the cliffs,
fishing.  As I observe him, I wonder
whether or not he is struggling
with a marlin of his own.  

 ↟↟

Of Wyoming & Montana

 Wyoming/Montana - July 2019

What are photos

but two-dimensional time machines

transporting the present mind to

safe houses lodged within the past.

↟↟


Photos are of Glacier, the Tetons, and Yellowstone.

Wanderers

 AS: No. 3

mixed media on paper, 2019

24" x 22"

(from Alexander Supertramp series)

Across the way, the ocean roars and rumbles
It softens just enough
for whispers to make it out of the night
An exchange
between rising sun
and luminous moon
quiets the land, anchors it
All is still
the quiet reverence of promise.

Write me poems from wherever you find yourself
and they will be heard even unspoken.

Sometimes,

Lee Vining, CA - A Couple of Autumns Ago (on 35mm film)

everywhere seems like nowhere
and nowhere
feels like
home.

I'm still figuring out things.
I collapse into long periods where I withdraw from
people
places
the entire world.
Usually, they are preceded by longer periods of
hyper-activity and production
spearheaded by unspeakable
sadness.

I don't know.
I'm not sure.
Maybe,
one day I'll figure out things.

---

↟↟

Teacher

 AS: No. 1

mixed media on paper, 2019

24" x 22"

How does one accept a lesson in grief?

By our mere humanness, we deny it.  

Refusing to be its pupil.

Protesting against its movement, its colloquial speech.

Scribbling over its illustrative diagrams, layering papier-mâché.

I wonder this: what does life offer to the one who accepts the lesson, even learns from it,

yet finds himself in continual conflict with his teacher?

Can a lesson be taught if the process does not reach completion?

Is there a dimension of grief that remains?

It is a longing of the deepest measures for the one who wishes to let go and return to himself,

to function and desire life again

without being reminded that grief is still present.

--

Opening up 2019 with a series very close to my heart.

Alexander Supertramp

A visual body of work exploring the meaning behind Chris McCandless's words, "I now walk into the wild." 

↟↟

(edited)

I Walk Scribble the Line

What if we were renegade lines without end

wandering across the planes of existence 
vying for a genuine touch, one palpable connection among
scores of uniformed lines

And what if we were marks made to illustrate brevity
restricted to a finite period and space

rendering that which is temporary, ephemeral to
hunters of meaning 

We are lines, we are marks, we are scribbles that vary in
all the ways possible.  

 ---

Find me where you know me to be.
-OH

Truths that Settle

 Memory, No. 11-05

mixed media on paper, 2017

21" x 24"

She spoke words that rose
from a crackling fire of first-time truths.
He took her words and emptied them into his
palms.  He rubbed them together, but 
only as means to keep himself warm. 

The Lines of Moving Forward

Memory, No. 11-04

mixed media on paper, 2017

21" x 24"

Do not refer to me as someone you once knew.
Because you never knew me.  Neither I, you.
No.  But that was your doing,
not mine.  And these, these beautiful wild lines, are
the lines of a woman moving forward.

Belonging to Now

Memory, No. 9-21: Last of the Summer Suns

mixed media on paper, 2017

21" x 24"

Last of the summer suns
I saw it sink into the glistening sea
biding long before Farewell
Painful to stay my eyes on the light 

yet, I do 

Kites sailing through dusk 

Silhouettes traipsing through the sands
Then, like that, in all its brilliant glory
the last of the summer suns is gone
and we along with it.

The River Smith

Memory, Study JS3

mixed media on paper, 2017

Jedediah Smith Redwoods, May 2017

I was running without knowing 

I had even begun moving

to a place I reckoned to be home

Welled from the deepest recesses

of stymied words and thoughts unpenned, I heard my younger self cry out with anguish 
My legs gaining a momentum all their own
nearly tripping over river rocks
as you called for me, and called for me by my name

As I closed in on the distance to the edge of your emerald blue

my pace slowed to long strides, letting the rain

and fog and cold come down hard
on a person I no longer knew
a person I no longer recognized.

An Age of March

Memory, No. 7

mixed media on paper, 2017

26" x 40"

---

When sight begins its gradual decline
and the morning light slowly loses its squint
and the body relinquishes its youth
When intellect ages into garbled words
and memory decides to step away from you
I will retell many stories, familial anecdotes
speak iridescent laughter into the land of mars black
I will share with you your past
We will keep company 
and carbon copies 
When you no longer remember 
me, when even your own reflection produces no recollection
Rest your head against mine,
and I will sit with you in the silence, arms over shoulders
together.

---

The Forest

Memory, No. 5

mixed media on paper, 2017

26" x 40" 

---


Stand quietly, lift one's eyes toward the elevated crowns, to the scattered pieces of a steel blue sky.  Hear her speak.  Hear her history.  
For there is none who speaks as eloquently as she, whose words pacify as many wounded spaces as hers.  Disappearing sheets of fog, slow moving mist, slants of sunlight whispering warm ochre into moss-covered shelters.  Handsome woodland fragrance, earthy musk.  A haze resembling a thin veil falls assuredly over the conifers.  A gentle wind sweeps through the aged state, and leaves descend onto the ground without hurry, carving sienna and umber impressions along the way.  Hear the faint rushing of water nearby; breathe in deeply the clean, sweet air of Eden.  These are her words, her conversations, the experiences she gives selflessly. Stand quietly, and you will hear her.


---



For Nala.
03.19.15
"In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows."  http://paperglassbottle.blogspot.com/2015/04/still.html.

Last & First

12.4

mixed media on paper, 2016

30" x 36"

2016,

Golden moon.  Stars blinding and brilliant. 

Trees, endless.

Sunrise, sunsets, lakes, and trailheads.

Late nights, early mornings, hard days.

Good days.

Laughter, sweet laughter. 

Quiet moments, quite a few.

There was crying, too.

A kangaroo, an old acquaintance, a

first love.

Rain, autumn leaves.  Kisses, innumerable.

One bridge, two.

Books, a handful.  

People, special

people. 

This is my letter to you.

For you were all of these.

---


Last piece of 2016. 
First piece in a long period of time that adequately expresses
the motions of this experiential year gone by too quickly.

Finished two hours before 2017 commenced.

Heart at Sea

12.2

mixed media on paper, 2016

30" x 36"

---

The sea is caught in a wintry storm.
Violent winds assault its calm. 
Waves are as high as Babel itself; they fill my
ears with an indecipherable language.
My attempts to understand it fails.  
Monsoon, I whisper.
My lips, deepened to a blue-purple from the void of heat, fight
to overcome the onslaught of salt water rushing
into a pair of human lungs on a frantic search for oxygen.
Breathing is labored, thinking is maligned.
Vibrations overwhelm the waters, thunder strikes a hundred times
it seems.
The waves are too powerful.  I am thrown against
rock formations, which I cannot see, only feel.  Sharp.  Jagged.
Crimson begins to pool outward in gradual ripples from
this trembling body.
Fingers make their way to the left of my chest.
An absence.  A pain.
The water rises and an
unfamiliar sound lurches forward that
even the warriors of spring cannot quell. 
Now agony tells me that it is gone.
It is gone.  
My heart.
Carried away by an illusion, carved out by a pair of hands
I once held in love. 
For it was I who had mistaken the wind for a breeze.  I sailed out to sea
unprepared for where it would take my inexperienced vessel.  
Searching now will do no good;
for the sea, so inescapably infinite, has swallowed
my heart, as well as the rest of me.   

Lune

She dips in between tall reds, wide oaks 
forest silhouettes untamed, endless
humbly nameless in space
A mild light falls gently onto viridian steeples 
warming trails of shivering
spines and their
pointed vertebrae
limber arches, latitudinous branches
rounded naked backs in basins coiled in rising clouds of steam
Undressed roads veer in different directions
eventually meeting somewhere unknown
vanishing together into
towering shadows angled over sleeping fields 
Again, the return of unhurried words
this poet of triumphant silence
Evergreen crowns and canopies brush against the tip of 
her soft, golden luster  
All is granular, slow moving

She gazes at us from light years away

and we walk with hands laced together, occasionally looking over our shoulders
to admire her beauty cascading across earth
ever profound, and
fleeting.

31

No. V

mixed media on paper, 2016

11" x 15"

(detail)

I must know you

if you choose to walk so close to me

to trail me like a shadow that does not break

to live in undefined proximity

I must wear you

if you stain my skin routinely 

soak through the porous, dense layers

mark my mind's absence with your presence

I must remember you

though I mustn't

I must forget you

but I mustn't

however, before I must or mustn't do either

or any other for that matter

I must forgive you
yes, I must forgive you

I must surrender you

if I am to heal you

perhaps then, this weight will lift

itself weightless

and these thirty-one callouses

will have run their course
and you will return to who you were
before I began to count your shortcomings
before I decided I no longer wished to know you.

I must know you know
that you are enough.

Because you are
and I am 

enough. 

---
 

A Painter's Holiday

With what a glory comes and goes the year!

The buds of spring, those beautiful harbingers

Of sunny skies and cloudless times, enjoy

Life's newness, and earth's garniture spread out.

And when the silvery habit of the clouds

Comes down upon the autumn sun, and with 

A sober gladness the old year takes up

His bright inheritance of golden fruits,

A pomp and pageant fill the splendid scene.

There is a beautiful spirit breathing now

Its mellow richness on the clustered trees,

And, from a beaker full of richest dyes,

Pouring new glory on the autumn woods,

And dipping in warm light the pillared clouds.

Morn on the mountain, like a summer bird,

Lifts up her purple wing, and in the vales

The gentle wind, a sweet and passionate wooer,

Kisses the blushing leaf, and stirs up life

Within the solemn woods of ash deep-crimsoned,

And silver beech, and maple yellow-leaved,

Where autumn, like a faint old man, sits down

By the wayside a-weary.  Through the trees

The golden robin moves.  The purple finch,

That on wild cherry and red cedar feeds,

A winter bird, comes with its plaintive whistle,

And pecks by the witch-hazel, whilst aloud

From cottage roofs the warbling blue-bird sings,

And merrily, with oft-repeated stroke,

Sounds from the threshing-floor the busy flail.

O what a glory doth this world put on

For him who, with a fervent heart, goes forth

Under the bright and glorious sky, and looks

On duties well performed, and days well spent!

For him the wind, ay, and the yellow leaves,

Shall have a voice, and give him eloquent teachings.

He shall so hear the solemn hymn, that Death

Has lifted up for all, that he shall go

To his long resting-place without a tear.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Autumn from The Poetical Works of Longfellow (ca. 1900s)

---

Each year, I look forward to the commencement of what would be longer nights, a drop in temperature, and heavyset pumpkins lining stairwells.  Skies and sidewalks dotted with crispy notes of yellow, orange, and red.  The fragrance of warm spices spilling out from the windows of busy kitchens and onto the red-nose passerby.  Earth covered in a haze that one can only describe as a slip from heaven.  

Autumn, she is every bit the inspiration, and the most revered of all seasons for this painter.

 

She breathes.

The sick man from his chamber looks

At the twisted brooks;

He can feel the cool

Breath of each little pool;

His fevered brain

Grows calm again,

And he breathes a blessing on the rain.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 

passage from "Rain in Summer" 

She endures.

A man worn down by time, 
a man who does not even expect death . . . 
a man who has learned to express thanks
for the days' modest alms:
sleep, routine, the taste of water . . . 
a man who is aware that the present
is both future and oblivion,
a man who has betrayed
and has been betrayed . . .

He knows better than to look at it closely . . .
that wretchedness is his duty,
but he accepts humbly
this felicity, this glimmer.

Perhaps in death when the dust
is dust, we will be forever
this undecipherable root . . .

-Jorge Luis Borges,
passages from "Someone" found in Poems of the Night