Song of Late Afternoon

I.

What bare feet meet in the tangled beard of bermuda grass,
In the squirrels standing farcically solemn, targeting metatarsi
By the strategic strewing of acorns, in the stabbing jabs of twigs,
Is an imperative to live forever. A fey invocation in the wind howls,
“Let us curl our phalanges for the digitus landings of soft dewey skin
On the shaley shoulders of the river!”

I clamber, rambling, the knees of my jeans in shambles
Up the tradesman’s path, past the lookout point, and
Down the thieves gully to the arching beech whose
Insouciant stance allowed a barefoot adept to ascend.
Twenty-one and foot-naked, perched in his old arms
I hear the desultory susurrus of the tree-beetles
And sip six-dollar whiskey from my hip-flask
Like a Mexican cowboy about to cross the Rio Grande, pardner.

And then slip steadily like a drop of sweat
Down the forehead of a mountain to the browridge,
Where a courageous tree shoots out acutely, above the river.
This nook with a grandiose look over land, river, and life.
Lately discovered by a xenophile craving exile.
I am an imp! (momentarily) A hairy, heathen sprite of the mountain
Dancing now in and out of a cloud of Latakia smoke
And reading old English versions of Persian poetry to
The mice and the sparrows and the baby snakes.

“What does the sun say, if not that it shall cover its nakedness with blinding spite?
What does the moon say, if not that it shall clothe itself in both darkness and in light?”

II.

I should have been an angel, but for the mud cakes tressing my hair.
For there on the hill between striving and rest, I climbed a heavenly stair
And panoplied in light ranked the pantheon sons of great might,
Promethian purposes pale standing bare and exposed in their sight,
So I returned.

There is ever a loneliness along the trail that skirts the tree line.
The trees are inebriated for the air there is thick as red wine.
I break into the river, ginger – for the stones hurt the bones in my feet
There is a laughter in the splash of the brook that is young and honest and sweet,
But it is leaving me.

The sunlight sparkles off slime on the half-sunken trunk of an oak
I stand bare in the waste-deep river that flows around me like a dark cloak.
I look around as the water drowns an ever greater part of the land,
When they let the dam out, I think I will not be able to stand.
Will I float on forever? –

As cresting stream becomes estuary,
          ever eastward in the aestival wind?
Will I reach the sea? — find myself barefoot
          in the brackish mountains of waves, moaning?

I will float with mordant mutterings upon my salt-split sanguine lips.

III.

In the opening and closing of eyes comes an all-ness
Like a realization that even the cloudless sky is full of something
The becoming-ness which confesses,
“What may be unfinished is not thus incomplete! O palimpsest,
Bear your pallor away from the shrouding aesthetic of pain!”

And I, stumbling softly, on the oft water-tumbled
Cobblestones of the crumbling riverbed, hands plunging under,
Halting my lunging form, sending missiles of water into my eyes
That blur the burn of the solar star into something suddenly so un-maleficent
That I behold her, rapt, as a beautiful woman on a far stage, her warmth, a
Weeping soprano strain, sailing through the sleeping darkness.

What ambles ashore wears the same bare-legged hide of a man,
Has swallowed a mystery which will burn like the ancient Temple fire. You can
See it in his face, lambent and waxing but yet weak.
It is the light of the hope that he will find the white garments he seeks,
To clothe him.

Art: an unqualified rumination

Ambivalence is unbecoming of an artist. Perhaps that is why so many artists are religious – religiously religious or religiously agnostic or Epicurean or whatever category might come along tomorrow. For the artist, what is is vital; what is not vital is not. Even the artist who finds beauty in the mundane finds the mundane extraordinary because he has found it – because it is, and he is an artist.

We have been taught that art must have a medium and an audience, taking for granted, perhaps, that art must have an artist and that the artist must have something beyond himself which he can experience and love. Perhaps we have taken for granted that it is the artist’s sense of urgency for what is that makes her an artist and thereby determines her medium, and creates out of her fellow artists an audience.

An artist is an artist-in-medium, that is, for example, an artist is a painter or a photographer, only because the medium is just as real and vital as anything else which has made him an artist. A painter is an artist not only when what she sees is vital to her, but when the canvas and brush and paint are to her beautiful things in themselves. Likewise, the medium cannot make an artist-in-medium. A photographer is not an artist for simply taking pictures of beautiful things. With the photograph, he makes something distinct from either object or image because the art-in-medium is as vital to him as object or medium alone. Thus, what he makes can transform object into subject because the photograph, itself, is.

An artist, in the ideal, does not find an audience. Rather, she makes an audience by her art, which demonstrates (or is the demonstration of) the vitality of her experience, and in this act is found perhaps the greatest value (or peril) in art as an agent of transformation. For art which is novel or innovative even to the slightest degree does not have an audience when it is first created. Rather, it is a drama between the artist and an audience which exists only in his mind. And we, seeing the drama are offered a choice: Will we become his audience? It seems an undemanding choice, but it may not be. For in entering the audience, we become not only audience in name, but in truth. We are changed into people who are, in truth, able to be the audience and thereby able to enjoy and love the art. The art does not become something different for us when we love it; rather we become something different in order to love it. Any “art” which lacks such a capacity to affect change is not truly art.

Experiencing art, then, is an exercise in being and becoming, and both of those with the great, inescapable compulsion which is demanded by our existence. I hope always to be mindful of its power to affect transformation so that my transformation will always lead onward toward that great goal which is the Resurrection of my flesh, the Redemption of my mind, of all things.