1982-1983
Light swirls in the avenue and
I take you hand past the everlasting night of
Tears in the garden, ripples in the lake, clouds in the sky, while
We last in dreams, you melt in rainbows, I swirl in clouds.
The dream opens to view the flowers: blue, violet, yellow,
And we meet the challenge of the deepest bond to begin.
Tell me twirls and spills in wet cabbage leaves
Give me heads and boughs of thought:
Wet conditions, forests of juice, life in jungles
Can you remain? You need music, you need light.
Whispering Blazes of Light
Shine and stream in the frozen day
In the last mile out
What we think we deliver
Lasts, flashes, looks like clover.
Delicious is the season, in the sea of saxifrage
Holy, in the mountain, see the father,
Paint your way.
Slowly the dream leaks, shoots past, and hopes to know
What scene? What dream scene is this, that lasts,
That makes time go. We grow. Have lasted and holy
The rushes bend, clover goes, lights illuminate,
Candles pour and all our dreams are soled.
We know how we last and we care about each other.
The pools are laced with moonlight
They figure in the wind-clouds
Interwoven, jagged, equipped.
The night clouds are laced in pools by the sea
Even when you walk past them
They don’t admit themselves
It is difficult to wander
To leave your house on a rainy day
But I have wandered these four weeks
And will be wandering for four more days
And I don’t think it’s easy, do you?
Rodin: “For an artist the thing is not dreaming or talking, but work.”
I continually fight with influences that would rob me of my strength and sense of direction. I recognize that my primal past is laden with troubles and horrors, but I cannot let this swamp of tumultuous forms drown me in itself. Each day clusters of terrible memories fall about me. I find that things had not been as wonderful as I’ve thought. All along I’ve had to do a lot to maintain a sense of well-being. It never occurred to me, but it does now, that my enthusiastic drive for wonders and truths has a corresponding abyss of terrors and emptiness. Each day I remember more, and each day I feel worse, but I do have a new sense of myself as a strong, determined soul, trying hard to make it out of the jungle. At the center I am strong, and I have a sense of humor, and this allows me to continue. Nobody has it easy, everybody has a lot to work through.
These are the most difficult days of my life, for all at once something about me decided that I was ready to know what I have been kept from.
08 May 83 Sun
My mind is a thought to be awake
A fresh flash off the night train
Liquid ripples pour to me and
Edge up my hope to be.
I drift between two seas
In a curve that I like to breathe.
What makes the sea brown?
Mud from the bottom stirred up.
It is undeniably so–
I feel it with my pulse.
A Kind of Imitation
Should we preserve intensity alone?
The string vibrating at the cello’s bridge?
Or stretch to nerve the fingerboard’s full range
In orchestrating waste’s cacophonies?
Is poignancy of beauty’s transience
As time runs over an apple in the stream–
The hesitancy of a summer’s dusk
When night stock stuns with scent–ours to forgo?
Must we desert court-ladies on the grass
Their sunlit-dappled breasts and lovers’ lutes?
The skill of craftsman-wrought, firm, rounded themes;
The guests of Mozart, Purcell and Watteau?
Bear with me if I leave such scenes behind:
The dark off stage preoccupies my mind.
Should we make the pace of being?
Or crest on lawns with message holy?
Or drink to drive the messenger aloft
In drifting endless edges?
Is movement of a dusky call
As people running to and fro–
The end of shattered innocence
For all we’ve ever known–and blend?
Must we think of nothing lonely
Nothing starred and stripped of hate?
The print of trees, twisting, branched
The fits of winter, summer, spring?
Catch me if you know I’m falling:
Pull me if you know I’m late.
Vincent Van Gogh
“What a mystery life is, and love is a mystery within a mystery.”
“I am . . . rich, because I have found in my work something to which I can devote myself heart and soul, and which gives inspiration and significance to life.”
Journal