Wordsmoker

 

 

One wonders if perhaps the subject

sat reluctantly.

Note the inertia shivering in his limbs.

As if he greatly wishes to rise

and flee.

 

The picture has an unfinished air–

blank patches, abandoned strokes,

hastily mixed colors

struggling to life,

            waist deep in being.

 

Pale shadows under the eyes–

The artist laid on too heavy here,

pre-occupied with ideas

of exhaustion and defeat.

Defeat already conveyed

with the subtler truth

of tentative posture

and the flesh’s sallow hue.

 

Eyes grey-green,

whispering like California grass.

Cool as autumn stone.

A lamb on spindly legs, minutes old,

blind and bleating sadness.

A generous hearth, exhaling.

Coyote rip-rap

                            in the chaparral.

 

The mouth a disgruntled hairpin.

A watery smile, quivering, as in a dream.

A piece if fruit moldering in

damaged sunlight.

 

Nose not broken, but undisciplined, defiant–

a residual glitch from the initial Cubist tack,

and the sudden shift toward, what…?

 

Realism?

 

And yet the unsettling incongruity remains.

A pall of invisibility hangs upon the visage,

as if the paint had been thinned too too much.

The viewer becomes suspicious,

thinking her eyes have begun to blur

with unexpected tears.

 

The realism is not of a

school.

It is not grim

like Van Gogh’s soiled, gnawing peasants.

Or noble in its vulnerability

like Courbet’s deer.

 

Yet there is still the wisp of some ideal.

 

The subject sits, chin in hand,

the classic pose of ponderance.

But unlike the Rodin,

he remains unconsumed.

 

His mind appears to hold its breath.

 

An asterisk suspended

in the dim light.

 

No Calder,

no abstract dervish

slicing quiet elegance

              through the gilded air.

 

No host of seraphim

and the terrifying chorus of revelations.

 

A soap bubble sheen, whirling, purple, clear,

snaps into

nothingness.

 

There is hope in a vacuum.

Into it rushes all,

the sick and the foul and the pure.

Amidst the river stones,

in the slosh and rattle of the pan,

 

the tiny, breathless glimmer…

 

Bite down–

                          authentic.