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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4560 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Four Paintings of the Artist with a Lover Wes Hyde Preface-A Leaf Falls I present this to you as a painting: a leaf falls, green, natural, earthy--Lucifer fell from Heaven not yet scorched. The impression of heat resurrects red layers of sandstone from sky to stream. Blue carves sadness with its flow, and carries a leaf onto the canvas. I. Baptism Parallel to the marriage of earth and sky, a horse colors the canvas and is a woman. - At seventeen I tried to discover the road ahead, saw spectres in the sighing branches. I was conscious of mountains, my future trembling like an image on the surface of water. I look back now, see the first raindrop strike, break the image, try to reach out to hold her, to draw her from the distance. My best friend stands behind me, asks what I am doing. Billy makes six figures now, insists I call him Bill. We shopped for America on the other side of curtains, spent nights in pursuit of our dreams, drank coffee in the mornings with the same crush on the same girl: that was growing up. It was Phoenix, 98 degrees at 10:PM with asphalt in my veins. We had no idea where we were going or what we would do when we got there. The sign read, ‘Live Music Tonight!’ We stopped in, found salvation in a storefront church. The music was loud, rewritten songs from Van Halen and Bad Company. I had never heard gospel like that. Cathy was sixteen. I went home and prayed, put her down on canvas, learned to sleep on the right side of my bed. She kept her window unlocked, showed me God, and the way to deserted midnight phone booths looking for gas cans-- my car was always running out of gas. We held hands, matched our steps, tried to twin our heartbeats. We celebrated celibacy, had all night discussions on the use of contraceptives, named unborn children awaiting marriage. Love was a can of cola at the end of a long walk, a pulse where dreams beat backward between two shapes of the moon -a white dog, which is death imagined, and a white worm, which is death adorned- both like two drops of blood. Pavement was the pace we walked toward love, but love was a poor kid, a Yeehaw! a cowboy that rode the moon across a hot-breathed popcorn sky. II. J’adoube Prefigured in blue, brush touches become buffoon, harlequin, a horse in the mouth of a woman where illusion is a freedom. - Water accepts the color of ideals, distorts reflections of clouds and plants, shifts the position of objects it contains. Here, the foliage bows down, a spider balances on the surface, darts for safety beneath the bank. Water sings its own song, pulls its current into the paint. Things that have color express what they are and recreate themselves in memory: this silvery fish was a spoon that slipped from her fingers, handcuffed the mind it dismissed before it touched the floor. Time loses its color, forgets itself as quickly as it is swallowed. She notices negative space, the missing outline of a spoon, bends to retrieve a flash no sound betrayed. It is gone. Between my fingers the spoon became a rhyme I forced to please her, a cliche that owned the moment, an allitteration of fears that had no meter. I wrote my fears on paper--a list of lost cassettes, highways and wet matches-- drove to the top of Woody Mountain, burned them, offered their bodies to wind. These lists, always these cruel lists. They brighten the flame of memory with tired lines and images used too often. I was in love with the words, drove into the desert, wrote sonnets, lost her to the tumor. I secretly slapped Chagal’s goat for rituals of ink and poorly tuned violins. Chagal understood love, deified it, gave shape to four-leafed suffering. I reinvented myself, raged, raved, Rand McNallied my way across a landscape of agonies and ideals, avoided mountaintops, dreamed on egg shells, fought back papier-mâché eyes with citron candles. Love dreamt of being while I slept, dreaming of dreaming of dreaming of… Stones about my neck sink like shadows and fall like wanting toward the warmth. III. Graphite and Winter Evening A red path continues from wheat field to universe, where a horse discloses the world in the movements of a woman. - This is the paper that was her eyes: Majora: a page mixing the pulp of madness with palpable silence. This is a vein of prose where she curled on the sill behind Roget’s making comparison of tears. Minora: delicate rice, haiku, a dog-eared page of Fleurs du Mal. I sit where I always sit, window opening on the forest, golden last light, frost of dry grass. I linger here before turning back, picture a curve of breast against the canvas-- the day shuts its eyes like a girl, parts it’s lips to the night. She dresses her sleep like a man, in cool blue winter where clouds come to wound the grass, their teeth of stars and claws of shadow, white mouth, white flesh, eyes filled with iron. She sleeps where fog is a corpse along the bay-shore, where gulls keen over an ocean of empty shells, where a fiddler plays and I pay in waltzes, sometimes with a tango, a black rose in her teeth, the flesh of memory gone. I open my eyes to bones and ashes, sift the soot for tears. IV. The Left Side of the Bed The green pigments are a horse, realism on a background of two deuces where I sleep, upside-down in the morning paper, and a horse lives in the heart of a woman. - Billy calls me on weekends, tells me how his boys are doing, that he loves his wife. His daughter from a previous marriage is coming to visit next week. I’m still trying to paint Cathy. I need to clean my apartment. There are a dozen empty cola cans waiting to be thrown away, a glass of milk souring on the coffee table, mail to be opened. I don’t know why I haven’t thrown away the box of tampons beneath the bathroom sink. Later, I’ll go buy more paints and a new ¼ inch brush. I need to bleed this asphalt from my veins. After all these years of matchbooks and misguided roses, I look back for her reflection in my mirror, buy flowers that blacken on the kitchen counter, hear her voice when I’m alone, sleep on one side of my bed--moths come in at night; I have no screens, only this candle. Snow melts on sodden earth exposing rock, drips from my roof leaving jagged teeth along the eaves. Tomorrow there will be no snow, yet I will still leave spaces bare where seven lean cows swallowed seven fat. No matter how many colors I wear my bones still show through. |
