PAINTINGS & POEMS: A RIVER RUNS THROUGH THEM

This year, as the year and I and the dim sun turned, I made a book of poems and paintings; small enough to fit in the hand and large enough to share - ten poems, some new and some a little older, and eleven new watercolor paintings created to converse with the poems - a thin keen clean volume.

I think a kind of river runs through it.

As I could only manage an edition of 25 copies printed on my aging, mean tempered, and perversely quarrelsome HP ink jet printer, here are some selections.

As you look through this selection I invite you to ponder the following possibility:

Paintings and poems share something important -

a concentrated form of paying attention -
paying attention to what IS!

And what is, is both moving and still.

Paintings are still and yet move in our minds,
thoughts and feelings.

Poems are always moving in our minds,
our thoughts, our feelings,
and yet they are always forming pooling echoes
of the still and eternal present.

Paintings and poems - two sides of one coin,
and a river runs through it.

DAWN:



Dawn,
with lighted fingers
stitches a delicate thread
an amber line of ridge against the night

- then begins
to hem
the greening march of trees
down along the still dark creek

- and begins
to mend
out of what might have been
this day together

- once again
such prescient
marvelous
needlework!

- surely sewn
we together
out of wonder
this world.

WE ARE ALWAYS DREAMING:

We are always dreaming,
the good life, the bad life,
the life not lived.

In our ceremonies
we mark our bodies
with the signs of our dreams:
flames and crosses and circles.

Wearing our dream marks
we carry our whole lives
into the country of our days.

We must do this - keep it up,
this dreaming into our waking country,
keep it going, keep it safe,
even into the desert of our selves.



OUR MEMORY OF IT:



Our memory of it,
like Half-moon River Marsh
in late summer or early fall,
a sweetened breeze
coming off the sea

its light a silvering of the past,
the tide of it
washing in and then back
again. That day

down on the sunlit dock,
the children singing.

Those times - more than enough
to burst the heart open.

Too much of it to hold now,
yet too little of it to ever keep.



WE ARE ALL:

We are all vagabonds
on this earth, wanderers
with hungry hearts

looking for a home
we never had.

At night we gather
to distant fires
of scavenged wood and brush

stir the ashes there
and seek answers in the stars.

In ceremony
we mark our faces
with our dream of want -

flames and crosses and circles.

And we carry this into all our days
even into the desert of our lives

dreaming into each new country
our home again.



WHAT'S NEEDED:



What's needed
is water
and dark

moving to a time
as slow as roots

in a well

where silvered fish
swim

in a dream
of knowing

not caught
but foreseen.

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH THIS:
-for Bill McLarney


A river runs through this
Blacksnake sliding under Jewelweed
flushing Robin surprising Blue Jay
screeching over mirror striding Water Spider
reflecting wheeling Red Tailed Hawk calling:
where are you where are you to Lizard
scrambling across old barn wood parched in the sun
gliding over Otter slipping from rock into water
flashing by Golden Shiner scurrying toward Sculpin
nuzzling mud beneath silver racing Gilt Darter
darting past Bloodroot stemming into whitened flower
from the moss blanketed bank shouldering
into the stream as rainbowing Kingfisher
alights and makes the heart stop
and the river run through it.

A river runs through this
a poem where I am swimming around you
composing dreams about rivers
to all of you swimming about me
who are dreaming poems about yourselves
and I am coming to a place and don’t have the words
and someone else tells me the next one
and so it goes, generous,
the swimming and the dreaming and the telling
and the river runs through it

you and me,
this river runs through us.

SPIRIT SALSA - for Lynn:



Come and dance
you and me
come and go

around and back
and come again
all the patterns flying

there is no you
there is no I

and we two are
but a fold in time.

Come!

and dance between
all the patterns making
and unmaking

you and me now

step again
with me now
into this always

changing
moving
desiring

and then just there
and then
where it calls us back

into the circle
where letting go
is holding on

to where
the meaning always is
moving on

to a desire
that brings to life
and the dance between

you and me
always making
come and go.

My love!
Come and dance with me!



TRINITY:



1.
This stream
is right here somewhere where I am ten
and running naked under the old oaks
along Trinity River.

2.
And this one
flows in my blood
with a generosity I can
in no way account for now.

3.
And this one
like a breath is slow
and long, smooth and deep,
even and balanced by that other,
the heart still flung open.



LESSON #2:
HOW TO LIVE A LIFE ON THIS RIVER:



Reach out
beyond yourself so far
you have to let go
of the shore.

Gather in what happens here.

Then pull back
against the undertow.
Sit on the beach
and examine your hands.

Most days
you will only be left
with flecks of mica broken
pieces of shell, the sands
of rock and time.

But sometimes
you will be left with fiery bits
of starlight.

These are yours.

So enter a river,
a poem, a church, a conversation
anywhere. Swim around
listen for the resonance
in the waves, for the motion
in the current.

Let each filament of river
weave into your breath.

Then say what happens here.
Know that we all are listening.

A river, a poem, a church,
a conversation, even a breath
it’s all a great river. I’ll meet you there.

READINGS

One reads the morning sky in the manner of deciphering its pattern of form and movement so to chart the possibilities for one's own outer and inner day. The wind out of the east, low clouds and the feel of moisture in the air means the likelihood of rain, and that means no work possible in the vegetable garden if it's summer, no cutting firewood if it's winter, and so that opens up the possibility of inner immersion in work in the studio or up in the study.

Or, wandering through the woods I notice the track of a deer, and begin to read its story - how big a deer, male or female (if the back feet make tracks outside of the line of the front it's more likely to be a female I think), was it going fast or slow, was it heading single-mindedly toward some goal, or was it wandering (and therefore probably lazily grazing its way along - what's been nipped along its path?), how old (this morning? - the crumbled, heaved up edges moist and not dried out, or yesterday or last week - the edges dry and cracked - but has it been raining for several days keeping the track fresh for many days?).

Or, at the grocery store I am intently searching for something I've run out of, and happen into an old friend not seen for months. Our eyes meet and I read their face - the flicker of an eyelid, the cant of the head, the movement of the eyes - whether they meet me directly, or shift away in discomfort; the corners of the mouth either beginning to stretch into a smile or set in defense of something, reading the signs of well being, or not, of welcome, or not, of embarrassment, or the reaction traced there to my asking "how have you been?"

Or, I am standing on the front porch with the morning's first cup of tea in hand, waiting to address the new sun coming up over the trees to splash across the field below the house with radiant greens, and waiting too for how that makes me feel - comforted, confirmed, even positive about what I might accomplish this day.

Or, I'm in the studio, stirring paint, and stirring my perception, trying to read the nascent shape forming there into actuality - a smudge into the turning edge that catches the light just so,  

Readings. And then there are the books. They are readings not much different than the ones above, in either breadth, depth, variety, or method. I am not a careless reader, but I do so in much the same way that I read other "sign" - the morning sky, an animal's track, some one's face, or a painting.

I've read much in my 64 years, a little of it valuable and a lot of it forgettable. Over the last 17 years it has narrowed mostly to reading over and over again the ones I know to be valuable because it has become increasingly hard to find new books that actually refresh and nourish - that encourage me to experience life in new and nourishing ways. The list of the ones I reread is short but rich -

Lewis Hyde's The Gift which I return to to be reminded of the true commerce of art
McLean's A River Runs Through It
Harry Middleton's On the Spine of Time ( both the carefully lucid parts and those when he slips into mere glibness - I've come to love his feet of clay as I would  a friend's and don't much judge him for it)
John Haines' The Stars, The Snow, The Fire
Nelson's The Island Within
Paulsen's Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass
Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams
John Inglis Hall's Fishing a Highland Stream
Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (its elagaic quality every bit as forlorn as Samuel Barber's "Adagio"
Robert Bly's translations of Rilke's poems
Gary Snyder's A Place in Space
Christopher Camuto's Another Country

I have read all of these many times. I once came to the end of Camuto's Another Country and without hesitation simply turned to the first page and began again. It was like a really good painting in the way it continually nourished and revealed itself to me. Some of its enduring significance lies in its layering of stories - his personal narrative telling upon tales from the past that in turn tell upon stories of language, myth and culture, and that in turn upon a listening to what the land can tell us. On a few days, when my life seems exhausted of content, purpose, direction, or possibility, I turn to it for solace, and bathing myself in the rhythms of his thoughts and words, I find life turn brighter, and for me (I'm a painter after all) incandescent. And of course to say that its significance lies in its layering is to admit that what I look for in reading signs in the morning sky, a deer's track, a face in the crowd, or in a book, is the intricate layering of life itself that is true.