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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3915 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, 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 Joseph tried to discover the road ahead, saw specters in sighing branches, was conscious of mountains; his future trembled like an image on the surface of water. He looks back now, sees the first raindrop strike, break the image, tries to reach out to hold her, to draw her from the distance. His best friend stands behind him, asks, “What are you doing?”— Billy makes six figures now, insists his name is Bill. They shopped for America on the other side of curtains, spent nights in pursuit of 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 their veins. They had no idea where they were going or what would happen when they got there. The sign read, ‘Live Music Tonight!’ They stopped in, found salvation in a storefront church. The music was loud, rewritten songs from Van Halen and Bad Company. They hadn’t heard gospel like that before. Cathy was sixteen. Joseph went home, prayed, put her down on canvas, learned to sleep on the right side of his bed. She kept her window unlocked, showed him God, and the way to deserted midnight phone booths looking for gas cans— his car was always running out of gas. They held hands, matched their steps, tried to twin heartbeats. They celebrated celibacy, had all night discussions on the use of contraceptives, named unborn children waiting for 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 they 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. - 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: 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 his fingers the spoon became a rhyme he forced to please her, a cliché that owned the moment, an alliteration of fears that had no meter. He wrote his fears on paper—a list of lost cassettes, highways and wet matches— drove to the top of Sinai, burned them, offered their bodies to the wind. These lists, always these cruel lists: they brighten the flame of memory with tired lines and images used too often. Joseph was in love with the words, drove into the desert, wrote sonnets, lost her to the tumor. His unblessed fingers drew strings and flame, the nakedness of her eclipsed wings. He secretly slapped Chagal’s goat for rituals of ink and poorly tuned violins. Chagal understood love, deified it, gave shape to four-leafed suffering. He reinvented himself, raged, raved, Rand McNallied his 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 he slept, dreaming of dreaming of dreaming of… Stones about his 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 disgorges 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 a comparison of tears. Minora: delicate rice, haiku, a dog-eared page of Fleurs du Mal. He sits where he always sits, window open on the wasteland, golden last light, frost of dry grass—he lingers there before turning back. The day shuts its eyes like a girl, parts its 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 he pays in waltzes, sometimes with a tango, a black rose in her teeth, the flesh of memory gone. He opens his eyes to bone and ash, sifts 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 he sleeps, upside-down in the morning paper, and a horse lives in the heart of a woman. - Billy calls him on weekends, tells him how his boys are doing, that he loves his wife. A daughter from a previous marriage is coming to visit next week. Joseph is still trying to paint Cathy. He needs to clean his 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. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t thrown away the box of tampons beneath the bathroom sink. Later, he’ll go buy more paint and a new palette knife; he needs to bleed the asphalt from his veins. After all these years of matchbooks and misguided roses, he looks back for her reflection in the mirror, buys flowers that blacken on the kitchen counter, hears her voice when he’s alone, sleeps on one side of his bed—moths come in at night; he has no screens, only this candle. Snow melts on sodden earth exposing rock, drips from the roof leaving jagged teeth along the eaves. Tomorrow there will be no snow, yet he will still leave spaces bare where seven lean cows swallowed seven fat. No matter how many colors he wears his bones will still show through. |
