brush stokes to keystrokes

 

It smelled like nap time outside this morning. I walked to my car at 8:00am (who am I kidding, I’m never on-time, it was probably 8:06am) and everything was still sleeping. I wanted to huddle up next to the tree near my car and nap with it under the fall sky. 

 

I haven’t painted much lately. Exhaustion seems to be running my daily calendar. That, and a surprise attack of nausea lurking around every corner. Whomever said this was a rewarding experience is just plain nutso. So far, at least. I mean, I’ve been a ball of complete joy (sarcasm noted here).

 

So the blank, panoramic canvas still stares up at me, like a lady in waiting. I’ll get to it. There’s no use in forcing something out if it’s not willing. Ugliness will most certainly ensue.

 

In the mean time, here’s one of my favorite Billy Collins poems:

 

Madmen

They say you can jinx a poem

if you talk about it before it is done.

If you let it out too early, they warn,

your poem will fly away,

and this time they are absolutely right.

 

Take the night I mentioned to you

I wanted to write about the madmen,

as the newspapers so blithely call them,

who attack art, not in reviews,

but with breadknives and hammers

in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

 

Actually, they are the real artists,

you said, spinning the ice in your glass.

The screwdriver is their brush.

The real vandals are the restorers,

you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,

the ones in the white doctor’s smocks

who close the wound in the landscape,

and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

 

I watched my poem fly down to the front

of the bar and hover there

until the next customer walked in–

then I watched it fly out the open door into the night

and sail away, I could only imagine,

over the dark tenements of the city.

 

All I had wished to say

was that art was also short,

as a razor can teach with a slash or two,

that it only seems long compared to life,

but that night, I drove home alone

with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart

except the faint hope that I might

catch a glimpse of the thing

in the fan of my headlights,

maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,

poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,

staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

 

Oh, and just one more. The first time I read this it was like falling in love all over again.

 

Thesaurus

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast

that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up

on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,

or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place

where words congregate with their relatives,

a big park where hundreds of family reunions

are always being held,

house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,

all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;

hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy

all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,

inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile

standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close

to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.

And every group has its odd cousin, the one

who traveled the farthest to be here:

astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven

syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.

Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.

I rarely open it, because I know there is no

such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous

around people who always assemble with their own kind,

forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors

while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away

from their families and the warehouse of Roget,

wandering the world where they sometimes fall

in love with a completely different word.

Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever

next to each other on the same line inside a poem,

a small chapel where weddings like these,

between perfect strangers, can take place.