Title: Eyeshine
Author: Paul Cameron Brown
Release date: November 19, 2009 [eBook #30504]
Language: English
Canadian Author and Bookman, Grain, Androgyne (USA), Maker, Quarry, Or, Otherthan Review, Jewish Dialog, Tightrope, Alpha, Nebula, Horizon, Boreal, Stuffed Crocodile, Northern Journey, Origins, Mamashee, Wee Giant, Unchained Heart (USA), Poetic License. Published with the assistance of Ontario Arts Council
7 Stillness 8 Hewanorra 9 The Intruder 10 Dinner at Eight 12 The Bay of Cortes 13 Oracabessa 14 Prospectus 15 Gladiators 16 Ocean Sea 19 Cold Passion 21 For Tom Thomson 23 The Woodsman 24 East of Oswego 25 Presence of Mind 27 Fishing Nets 28 Rites of Intensification 29 Jagged Wire 30 Eyeshine 32 Sweet Water 33 Primavera 34 The Encounter 35 Magpie Tongues 36 Plums and Vine 37 Perhaps 38 Approaching Thirty (Lauds and Matins) 39 Passageways 42 Kindling 43 The Glowworm 44 Between Two Stones 45 The Waters of the Bay Lie Beneath 47 Passing 48 Kith and Kin 50 To Sit Arrayed 51 Silver Coins 52 Sentry 53 The Potato Eaters 54 The Assignation (Pons Asinorum) 55 Haunted Child 56 Triangular Trade 57 Casting Rocks 58 Brushstroke 59 Man 60 Landing Schemes 61 Mirage 62 Stone Guide 63 Red Illusions Under Glass |
Invitingly, the sea shines her stars, captive flames within an impatient heart as darkness loads the pleasent isles with coarseness, slow sparks rise over a roaring fire. And strolling beaches near dawn when the sand fleas & crabs are seen to flee, one catches upon the imperfect stillness a song of one - wind with sea drawning near inward, such stars turn as bonds at last worked free. [7]
The moon, at most a shudder or two away. The sky, bivouaked and cloudy, is within twin sloops of a bay. The lagoon opens, spars with the greater ocean by island hopping, green azure blue, as the wind steps before an open sea. The great ridge of the mountain lies obscured by rain; jasmine, frequent colour and plantations with cocoa, soursop, and cinnamon. Arawaks, Pelee, Carriacoi, Anegada, Josephine of the Creoles, let Admiral Rodney atone Lord Byng. And my Patois beauty, breath laced Oleander sweet - take the hemming from your dress then come sit down with me.
[8]
The colouring of spacious flowers rove delicious to the eye. The road above the harbour fickle, carousing in its tendency to pull too gray by sky enamelled water. The tropical foliage, still and languorous, to my touch. Each particle of sunlight dangling as if hoisted from a perfumed ledge. Newly mown grass in streaks, browns serpent-like across the path. Low erogenous puffs of dust are swathed by passing feet. Near by, bushes wear the foliage of streaked mud as a mantle might cottonwool at Christmas. Life in such climes is built on connotations rather than pure innuendoes of purpose. The southern sky, the heat above the sea allude to this. This triumphant trilogy embossed upon volcanic slate, more crumpled paper than firm land. Gravesides lying in twilight nakedness. The scion moon in her damaged vestry between acolyte clouds. Hamlets resembling clotted blood, nicks across an earmarked horizon. The poor, wavering to transfixed in their hotly owned sun; the one commodity they rightly possess. The outpouring sea, loosing herself in bridged inlets, countless points that nudge the land in acknowledged supremacy. The irrelevance of time, inbreeding of pale intruder.
[9]
At times, I thought of swizzling white rum in the tropics (not as a vocation), dropping into the club for a round of tennis before dinner at eight or a quiet set of darts before retiring. I had grown accustomed to my new routine (at least vicariously). In the best Somerset Maugham tradition I would dress for dinner, decline to be patronizing, avoid the potential slur if crisp linen did not appear regularly on my bed or table. I still found time to stop for breakfast coffee, take a moment from regimen to fondle fresh, wet flowers, look over the balcony at the blueness of the bay. The metaphysical qualities that come into play erode such morning somnambulations. The heat depreciated any vainglorious attempts to lionize the native Caribbean rum. Tennis and darts become ho-hum, more of a task than a pleasant diversion. The little yellowed board seemed to symbolize not convivial cordiality but crabbed provincialism. The tie & collar were intolerable against the saline tropic night and seemed rigid in a place and time the locals could not possibly share. In short, such things celebrated my apartness. Linen rarely, if ever, appeared and to resort to complaints resulted in only furthering the distance between one and his hosts. Even the coffee tasted bitter and seemed unsuited to the needs of an interloper. Neither was fruit juice the promised manna. And one can take only so much nostalgic flower warbling. The hummingbirds and oleander came to grow as commonplace and exhausting as the rain. I began ruminating thoughts back to my previous existence. Surprised at my illogical shift in allegiances, I began stealing thoughts more and more surreptitiously about the naturalness of working a full day, donning the apparel of a civilized man, dropping the white man's burden. Disgust filled me with my former Rousseauian yearnings. With trepidation, one's dreams can erect barriers more effective than the most ill-sponsored illusions.
[10]
The sea is a requisitioned article in my possession. Above, in fat circles of conformity, glide turkey vultures, their combs a rich obscenely red. The guano rocks are isles and stepping stones of bird waste. They lie thick and bedeviled with fish fur, a dull lavender cached hard to the sun seems to shine a metallic harvest white as desert rocklets scattered to the breeze. A speck of a fisherman dots the horizon. His craft a barque in loneliness across the sea. Dolphins inveigh the richness of the depths, persuade latitudes to drift about their wake. Pelicans sour the parabola distances between light and sound, become chancy over this distant breath of song. Above the cliffs and the inner roads that follow the desert into geometric squares, stand abodes. The thin supremacy of shadows at dusk disparage the traveller here. Burros strayed lie dead by the highway's edge. The liquid depth of the mountains reinforces vulnerability. The night air is alive with the torment of insects, asplash with sound. Lights carry an eerie message dotted about the hills. Feeling alone is a delicacy to be savoured by the standards of the tropic sun.
[12]
An iron wrought gate of turpentine force conveys little pigment, almost black parchment letters mindful of hands, arched and stroked from the very stone, until an elephantine water runs nettle sand to their granite perch. The broiling heat in this part of the Indies one knows must, posthaste, carry to the humus and flies any modicum of human remains. And, over distant dispatch of time, the elongated sprawl of waves dashing up straight to the shallow's grave, makes memory drawn, any record of the little parish's dead flimsy in the topsy context of soil and undulant peat. A greened isle stares past the feckless scene, past again an aged church noticeboard that scrapes out traces of news worthy of import to the wormy road. Whitewash, the colour of the shackled crypts, casts upon the church a pallor of distraught gray. A goat is seen foraging between such marker stones. The day seems to cut into the marble white detachment of the sarcophagi with abrupt candor. Yet, while the cove pokes like a walking stick, the sun & earth conspire to reclaim this space as their rightful bread. A huge vegetative urge to growth is witness to abundant further life - life in whorls of bamboo shoot, naseberry thatches & canebreak all garnished a short stride across the barrier gate.
[13]
In salt flats, idle pools bunching off the ocean, multi-legged crabs, worsted stalks - sea crimson weed weigh the panoply to heighten my deepening fervour. In the bedrock shanks of spread tidal basins clothed in spools of enveloping brackish water, a plethora teeming with aqua towns and untold gadgetry exists - replete with mimicry including primeval flotilla tanks and broadsheets for spreading their way of life.
[14]
No broken visor, emptied glove abandoned cudgel, opened net - only gathering spots on spreading sand. Clang of cymbals wrench of flesh, death is a morsel delectably met.
[15]
All that is eternal is circular. - Aristotle Cueta and Tetuan are outposts within the Arab psyche, frail islets jutting their Islamic consciousness into the infidel mind. A mere eight miles separates the tip of North Africa from Iberia's reclining form. An Arab dhow sits off the port of Tangier where the unsuspecting can lose more than priapic curiosity. Arabia, from Ormuz to Sofala, an empire of sabulous plenitude - shiekdoms, oil rich fiefs, and luxurious enervation. Da Gama rounds the Bight of Africa, needles the Saracen eye. Tutankhamen rests dolefully within the dunes away from bone merchants until 1923 draws nigh. Ptolemy errs and extends Africa to the Poles. The noblest failure in antiquity rests in Zama while Jesus toiled for our betterment at Galilee. Richard dies besieging Acre. Carnage occurred at Lepanto with attendant demise of the Turk. Marco Polo ignores the Levant for the riches of a Khan. The memory of El Alamein burnt away any vestige of Tobruk. The Casbah is my twain that confirms East & West shall never meet. The False Prophet is in abundance, notwithstanding Western civilization's fierce resistance to his ideas. Minarets, prayer rugs face Mecca five times daily while opium on a mother's breast induces premature death in unwanted infant girls. The purdah is an eerie monologue between the feminine form and purloined courage. Mysticism juxtaposes carnal delight in the halls of the Saladein's concubines. Harems & the seraglios are the coveted date wine. In Cape Bojador, there lurks a primeval instinct, a nagging supposition all is not right with Araby. The bath, the cloying sweetness of duplicity, stirs amidst trenchant eyes. Marmelukes are more than adventure book fiction in the silent quarters. The swirling dust, the prohibition of alcoholic drink, are dervishes in the hadji's brain. Everywhere, the ragged people cluster, almsgiving becomes a prayer in the saline night. Any but the Moslem faith caught in the pilgrimmage to Mecca meet swift death. The shopfronts with their bronzed clatter, decantered gold, near haggling that becomes the economics of plea bargaining, wits desire against pressing need. Debarking from Algeciras, facing the sublime North African desert as her colours coil, pitch forward amongst the hills, squares this continent's personality against the Occident. Europe found other continents soft butter to her trenchant blade. Here, she must consider herself matched with the heady dictates of survival.
[16]
Some dead undid undid their bushy jaws, and bags of blood let out their flies... Dylan Thomas The land is barren wears straw wisps as an unkempt man might razor stubble. The land is dry, a faded yellow in its barrenness. A sky broods from afar, a stalactite sun accounts merely a jot above that thin road into despair. Grass lies everywhere dead, faded tongues above an earth afflicted with scleroderma, deadliest of skin disturbances, forerunner of deeper pestilence. An erasing wind whips the fields further into bereavement; turns tiny bits of chaff to pursue themselves in a mad St. Vitus dance of cold passion. Starry night. With halos about the moon, pale and languid, big as crimson, far as wind driven flax. The orange pallor, pale with liquid swoon and ability to churn itself about the night sky or flood in endless beams our poorer spectacle below.
[19]
I have thrust my fists up to ice in the galactic mire of lake, lured my minnow wriggler eyes as bait to ensnare inroads, lake bed wreaths, across the windchill spine of brooding heart. I am on the essence of the North where latitudes of cold spontaneity remind me the nameless lakes part not easily with their secrets. A man's bones go easily to rot in the frigid perspiration called primeval ooze, precambrian sweat, the tertiary stage syphilitic crawl of advancing ice. All those terms your detractors, analyzers, devotees coin to define you: the Boreal, taiga, subarctic steppes, white hell, recoil under the onslaught, the lustrate message straining up alkaline clear. Water is your blood. A vast hoarding, most of this planet's fresh drink is flushed through your bowels, with kidneys separating the renic qualities as snow and sleet, the night side of your character. Tom, son of Thomson fame, his little canoe immeshed as scrubbed floorboards now, a giant winnowing such scattered firewood over a slow crop of putrefying muck; perhaps I see your eyes as sturdy bubbles popping from legions of green liquid to carouse with your firm memory.
[21]
Barely annoying the woods, his cabin like our woodpile home now for chipmunks and birds, isolated by the lily pads - he eschewed all comfort. The view barely cognizant, the prospect of the Massasauga rattler and an occasional broken tin sharp at the edges was like water's drift audible, not yet seen. Toying with the cove, past island jetties & blueberry groves inside little giant's tomb; this man became ingratiated with lake treasure, his clearing a triumphant blast. He affixed his mark - blazoning human habitation on a lonely spot.
[23]
Ticonderoga to Lake George, the classic invasion route up the Richelieu valley past Plattsburg, Verdun, à Montréal across the North Shore reroute again to savour Albany; last of the trading posts east of Oswego before New York protective sanctuary lodgings, free from the scalping knife barrens and the horrors Fenimore Cooper described. Apple crisp, fall damp the air with an unbroken stretch of forest and Adirondack mountains, there, delicate slip of fair womanhood bliss, she lies, gentle as the finger lakes clothed in autumn crimson.
[24]
Spring heralds the summer with lilacs perched from that door. In snows, a swarm of bushes lie black and apparently rootless as the town's iron-gate bridge collapses under the centre part of the main road. Little enclaves of activity pass as stores, mere centrefolds across busy highway arteries this time of year. I am a grey fleck in my dark wool coat near the perimeter of a winding fence. The casual observer gives me half a chance to be seen in the deathless white, opaque coloured moonstone so still against the field's shores. A plaster river, her sides inserted with isle-dotted chunks, hands across a winter solstice tribal dance. Ostensibly, I poke the land from stylized limbo, a chalky substance disturbed with every movement's cough. And if I were to fall, lie down, and cry, the agonized winter's frantic sun would bury me with shadows, give forth dark branches to my freedom. In the growing dark, I ponder white and infinity. The hectic pace of the distant highway absorbs less and less my hope. In private cold, my face burns a tallow white, toes flake in frostbite or erode every sensation. Stars in the dark canopy above are cryptic mourners and people frigid sorrow. Black is my colour as I ebb steadily toward their heights. By morning, when the first wisp of straw or dry leaf catches light near this stringent fence, an occasional passerby with the presence of mind shall comment how lifeless fields are in the clutch of brittle snow.
[25]
The polar stars drip in blood . . . Orion's mythical crystal white with clarity of forest and low expanse of sky; wooden barques, incandescent, row peals of silver light sowing each slough of wave, spider hues drip upon wetness forlorn with tug and rein.
[27]
Did time on the Hegelian spirit, Freudian id, the totemic response to the unknowable where each phenomenon of nature became dream time itself, the electric crackle of God's Voice- movement from shadowy spectre to tight-lipped showmanship the learned empathy of tires careening around their throttled load.
[28]
A rail fence is more than that on a country dawn moving by lots over hill & stone; it barely pauses in the small of the field's lap, then is caught in grey positioning as light unfurls the sky. All is a matter of perfect blistering - dauber wasps are seen to heave the moistened wood in chunks to mossy furrows, benign in their firm embrace upon alabaster trees. There, crusts of heavy nails, marked like fortresses, droop in their rusty mail. Mostly ants, in open canter, move in as upon an urn & lance far more than jagged wire the breath of stillest air.
[29]
I remember the world like a picture. The habitat of trees and sense impressions, the cover of leaves as fall spurred its way thru corridors of plasma forest & sarsen stone. Most of all, I saw illuminated clearly the brash self poke of logic that came massively when sunlight stirred, lilted its early head erasing the world thru sand crusts of colour. The cabin floor, a cold dawn infinity, was a chilblain on frosty morning shadows - the old cupboards staring like flowers through a break in the leaves watched till the latches & hinges were worlds in frozen power, dark rust as thoughts meandering like age. The stamped down clay, the well worn earthen crust that met the door on opening showed the erring calender all its interminable days that waited, like madmen, to remind one of oceanic time. And, on wakening, the careless passage of life across speckled windows saw a terrain of light - tiny works in agility, the forest looming bright as meridians off ladders bristling with homuncular forms. Door of caring, the gentle trail left as a universe to announce the brittle thrust and restive eves of daytime shadow.
[30]
The leaves lie hidden as spades about their home. Brief movement of a kitten, then silence till the car's engine drones. Close by, a pioneer cemetery sits near a secondary wood. Queer is the effect of sun on a tinted roof; bluebells with poppies, cowslip and tiny brook back of fields redden and given to wheat. A house is a machine processing the water of living a replenished cistern, birds paying a call, a minor animal brushing past an ivy-railed fence.
[32]
A poem is perishable and, like it, so much of life is spent in intervals - the jarring second regaining consciousness, a post-mortem flick of the lank equestrian eyelid that signals morning's first crepuscular move. ... a little salad consciousness about the tumescent room with the sentient purr of a cat; her musky oils a green verdure lapping primordial scent to engross a little readiness as the day progresses to its Oedipal stage and arrested development.
[33]
Today surprised me like a red fox blurting out of an October thicket - empty, dry, the burst of its energy camouflaged much as that fox, solemn and cold, biding his time till he thought I passed.
[34]
Trillium breath, an ounce of feathered growth unravels in the cloves of the silent forest. The rain is heavy with the stamp of perfumed trees realizing slight restraint on bursting seed. Cloaked in fragrance, tufts of mossy step kiss the opening earth, a basement horizon presumes the darling test of flower across dale & rustling nook, then undresses moist greenery with sumptuous eye. The last is hardest - cat crimson, a fire weed sunset lotion, the rain erased away; nobody special harangues the leaves but birds steal in quietly with tenderness clothed of verdure to pinch a leafy oasis about their forest haunt.
[35]
Plums and vine (as the Atlantic is green) intone the heavy church wall with errant sprigs, so Heaven sent they are big with earthly passion racing for the sky. Madonna Poverta in her midst with the pulpit clutching Light - so gnarled, like bush, that each crevice reeks with stone all stooped under such worldly avarice.
[36]
Perhaps the sky once was shadows, the moon lisped 'mongst April's song. Now, those warm lips ease departing sorrow like pressed flowers emptied from hallowed ground.
[37]
Laconic tears or Botticelli's Venus holding the years like tresses in a wistful pose. Tenebrous youth accosted by callow Time bleeds the heart with spring aloes. No comfortable shibboleths to restrain the wriggling polyps in the skin or nestling hair. Gerundive in movement, each particled whimper of the clock surrounds a cloistered second poised about the bearded target. As far as you know, nothing unusual. A total of eight hundred months but grammar school sums, spiel & mileage to drift across a lifetime. At thirty, the best half of the potage is gruel hand drawn from the sabulous pot.
[38]
Greet the days - greet the moon, gather the stars... Man is not at one with himself - collars the infidel ways of his race under pressure domes of widening silence. I scan the horizon barely cognizant of the metallic bits that pierce the night's crown - no jewelled orb stabs this queen's spectre. I am running and lost. . . ever slow to breech this reasoning. Honeysuckle mist with armfuls of orange lilies with scent stronger than the carriage needed in their gathering. Place the constellations upon their heads, the colour so transcends. And then there are the bludgeoned stars fallen into the eyes of my farmhouse scene. The sphinx moth that darns the night with her acrobatics escapes the wreath of troubled moon that places about her proboscised head. Let her stone the night in peace, feel palpitations on her ocean breast. The darting of stone cracks in fissures along the causeway to the stonehouse is certain and sure. A definite mood projects the starling tunnels, forlorn now with limpid darkness, crushed lavender from the pews of thoughtful night. There are armfuls of crushed bats in the passageway to my heart, each reeking with squeals to alarm the most frightened princess. Only one has stained the pass key and I must find her. A toad abides the thoughtful recess broken under the wall. He is a good toad and mourns the night creaking from the river bed. A monster dragon to the insects making a living near the light - a source of amused contempt to lepidoptrists squeezing the eye's circle, pressing her to release her giddy charms. At morning, skeletal remains shall stain the blighted chain (mood collector, toad, moth) but, for now, only the night buzzes with alarm, cracking her secrets with each tiny monster hurled at light's intrusion into dark. Perchance I shall narrow down the divide, position alarms, remind myself I am inured to the mood & scent that mans this cosmic bandwagon. I hold up flowers to remind me light escapes through jelly and that rare LUMINESCENCE exists only in lost bat chambers buried deep near the recesses of the snake. The cry of havoc, all those armfuls of collapsed lilies breaking under the toil of enforced handshakes leaves me like a broken lamp. I have no more shades to patch the plinths or barricade my heart. I have left my love on bended knee in a land I choose to forget.
[39]
As a matter of fact, ovens do carry a glazed stare, fireplaces are wont to parry thoughts to kindling before their stoop and on breathless summer nights one is hard pressed to recall cinder and blackened barleys any more vegetatively than upon these harridan pots.
[42]
In slow sutures of pale white - dabbed in growing spume & mud dried earth, a glowworm is obliterated by warm, soft light coming up to elbow particles of near dappled clay that plants dissect, warm as feasts, aloft a muscat lawn. Pale, segmented tortoise - trite in area and jellied purpose, the glowworm oozes headlong through an aroused dark necking furiously with fungus turds and truffles rooted from the pig ground by mice sized swine holidaying on scents and mildew salvaged thru pores & nestling bowels of their planet sized turf.
[43]
They poured hot water into people's cups in which green tea leaves were floating like algae, or into red-painted spittoons placed on the floor which the travellers made frequent use of... It was strangely quiet.
[44]
An abandoned house - dark salved to eclectic; crinkly, black pigment of old pine boards disparate to the elements. The waters of the bay lie beneath. A long slope trailing back of brush, garbles stones hoarse in the throat of a dust-flecked field are made more barren by the skunk cabbage weeds, the ugly, flotsam cloaks of horse hair to the neck - a hair shirt, coddling abrupt the barren pain tilled from empty soil. The summer's heat. Nameless insect waifs wavering, adjusting tumult to straighten the tight air about the outward door frame. Pinched in windows, glass in refugee lots billowing about urine paper; nails a ruddy pick dried to rusty blue, some dim shiny in their cropped disrepair. A road dry, rotating bare, nameless zigzagged only limestone in shelves meanders in throngs about stony debris, sometimes up to this beaten house.
[45]
I should be busy with words but light distracts me makes for me, in the sowing of its waves, neutral observances, a chilled awareness that the sublime is contained herein the wonders of the commonplace.
[47]
Once there was a giant who lived in a kneecap, a peculiar giant at that who expelled all reality as a pig might a poke. Not concerned with the dilemma of easing life's toothpaste form into dental crustings or oblivion's dark shadows from lightless paths, the giant assumed guardianship over his fibro-tissual home. The giant could be seen ferrying dwarfed bones over the inter causal dome of flesh and blood. At times, he substituted a remarkable likeness for his kith and kin by dumping calloused cushions, too long cousins of the diaper rash effect bunions, corns, carbuncles eager to roam the padlocked sockets between distant fibula and tibia. Poor femur, of course, was outraged against carpals and the growing phalanx arrangement of distant phalanges. Even the metatarsals were girdled in righteous indignation committed against their person by a maverick masquerading in pelvic insubordination. Altogether the body contains 206 bones. It is rumoured none contain a giant of his capacity, notoriety, or effect.
[48]
To sit arrayed and task consumed by the edge of a window, the world as fire stepping free of winter's stain, jutting fingers of light to a basement ledge then allowing their foggy movement to displace dust's circle as it has come to be known over the last five months, is to come as near as possible to the brink of private sanity.
[50]
Seen the whores in doorsteps, slack, crouched as packing crates behind their quiet wardrobe lamps, inset like a skeleton's crown there to bend our will, provide passageways to power and suggestion; the winding entrance to rouged light flickering with powdered flesh yellow of gold, then black to ivory a frightful circus in a palace of turn within the grate of execution.
[51]
In Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream, eyes are grouped as discs, almost rotund arches, much as suns breaking over an eclipsed wall. Hollows, jittery the bridge a creamed escape careening the soul madly backward a pastel gathering sky - water rivulets where two solitary, graven figures seem indulging a flaccid, breaking stream.
[52]
The potato eaters - grim, weathered souls wrenching a meal from sandy waste. The dark toil lined ridges carried from their fields to each human face, dim, pale light as shadowy as lives eked out upon this stoney rash of soil. Brows, a murky legend of overwork - deflected hope, seasons up in the smoke of a potato boil.
[53]
Many devils are in woods, in waters, in wilderness and in dark, pooly places ready to hurt. . . people, some are also in thick, black clouds. Martin Luther . . .Masaccio to the Florentine Renaissance but a naught- every man the same, St. Francis the same as a Jack the Ripper. their rosy surfaces filled. Like an Old Testament curse he is loosed upon the earth. Ecking out his pound of flesh delivering misery in sordidness, he parboils the land. A modern day Tantalus up to his throat in burning lies, his death is to live, in the contemporary sense, the thousand cuts- to bury the skies as a dread Caiaphas into the contradiction, the snares of his being. Measure for measure his blond mane, pale scarf are hallmarks of the doomed Dutchman searching out the Coromandel; like Cain stumbling upon existence, he hearkens back to the original Murderer, has sold his inheritance for a pittance and by doing so has ridiculed the human condition with his life charged obscenity; his blond beast scowl curdled about respectability's neck, his fang tussled face a menacing white cigarette, the soul imprisoned jailer to his teeth, breath and brain.
[54]
In the dark of wedlock nightly sky, the wither of hope and estranged replies, cause a white face to flicker with transparent eye, calumny of purpose to slowly die.
[55]
I would watch him lifting another drink from the fridge, joke about the connection with a triangular trade - bedroom to kitchen fridge, then to the bathroom - only to repeat the cycle not knowing such comments scratched his eyes climbing through the window for escape.
[56]
Merely on edge, the wharf in bad light clinging to water's ledge - a loon from afar the Woods closing with each sound. Casting rocks toward moon's glare lapidations laughing back, the treacle of warm night coaxing fire's glowing might. Sudden, oceanic wilderness breathless in barked silence - and camphor to keep the flies at distance, the anchored boat like a prison ship dallying on the waves, brambles & underbrush sunken wet sand, abundant berries rasp in thickets - the cottage like a jar closing for the night.
[57]
On rue Vincingetorix, a Paris hovel in a garret of cold - Gauguin enchanted serpentine colours, the medium of a brushstroke from a paltry primitivism. Rue Vincingetorix, cloudy haze sun as billowing plaster, neatly laps scrapes clean the bereavement of a man's pain.
[58]
In the old air by his rocker, a silent trapeze of thought suspends an aging man. Each movement as of the katydid droning - a monologue with the past; a buzz escaping across still, warm air. Elsewhere, cicadas whittle about the octogenarian heat. Nestled quietly, a supine stare erodes both time & place unto bearded grey - nuances clasped in a breathless chat with death.
[59]
Omens are the cloth of dreams scissors used to open sky - the future riding birds en route to ariel docking piles. Leonardo was of the opinion creativity might be enhanced a notch should aspiring artists nota bene principalities, bile, their rhumes as tiles then perceive them piecemeal as stratagem, not snuff or random blotch, the heads of diseased pigs but conjuror-sextants toward the stars.
[60]
The intense focus of light but pointillism, into this juncture bits of light surround rough, inverted sky - dawn is their message unfurled about the alumni apparatus of incensed eyes and whispered sun. The heavy mirage of dots, landscape locked Seurat, a frieze of summer heat choking water lilies - the sun as a crystal ship adrift across bedlam-sponsored random dots.
[61]
She was fading - into the stone into rifled shadows heavy with fallen light, rippled boughs of splitting fruit & droopy leaves to a sallow body under clumsy years that ripped the tunic of her coat while bleating the dismal age with each petal fall of a stockinged foot.
[62]
Life as green illusion - the cool fronds of the fern are deep set in firmest soil and the grassy narrows brook a silent, liquid play. Red illusions under glass - quietly picking strawberries where a woman hums to the buzz of flies with the afternoon sun disappearing overhead. Each grasp of the berry a red stain, the darting of seeds, crimson tendrils do confuse the eye with a polka dot starling raucous in glee above.
[63]
Copyright © 1978 by Paul Cameron Brown All rights reserved ISBN: 0-88823-014-1 Published by Three Trees Press P.O. Box 70, Postal Station "V" Toronto, Ont. M6R 3A4, Canada Printed and bound in Canada.