Upcoming Show- After
candle Grass
For the month of February, I’m going to be the featured artist at the Benicia Plein Air Gallery. My show this year, titled “After”, is in memory of my stepdad, Albert Bolter, who died in June. I’ll be manning the gallery 5 days this month, and I’ll be bringing in additional work from the last year. I’ll be there all of President’s Day weekend (Friday- Sunday, February 12, 13, and 14th), and also Friday and Saturday of the next weekend (February 19th and 20th). The Benicia Plein Air Gallery is open 11-5. Masks are required. You can find out more about the gallery through this link.
This show is something a little different for me, as I’ll be hanging some of the poetry I’ve written in conjunction with the artwork I’ve been producing. Some may remember the post I did in September- When a Parent Dies. Those poems and paintings will also be part of this show, as well as the new work I’m sharing in this post. Please follow the link to read and view the work I have there, in conjunction with what is in this post.
Ab, in better days
Much like with my artwork, I don’t like to force things into a sequence with my writing. As I work through things, my views slowly grow on their own. I let subject matter come out as it arrives, and sometimes, afterwards, I find there was a natural syncopation that occurred as I created things in sequence. Some pieces fit, and so I share them. Others, just as it is with paintings, remain as fragments- private and less successful. I guess it all follows a process of grieving. I don’t know. How could it not be? But I know it’s what I’ve felt and thought and desired to paint and write over the last seven months.
Similarly, there is not necessarily a direct, planned relationship between the paintings and poems. I’m definitely not writing the poems to speak to a specific art piece. However, as I reflect back on things, it’s very clear to me that the poems and paintings relate to each other in an organic, free-field sort way. They all grew to maturity in close proximity to each other, and like siblings that grow up together and then leave the house, they are all individuals but also connected.
thank you for the patch of light
The Gift
He told me a story
about kindness.
He appeared when he didn’t need to.
And he stayed when he didn’t need to.
Free from the trappings of fatherhood, he acted as one.
And he did not ask for.
And he did not say so.
I came to him in the dark,
on the steps of the porch.
I heard a story about kindness
as I sat with him. About my value to him.
And in it the leaves crackled
as he rambled through the yard,
food and music came from the earth,
and he taught me how to stay,
and to tend to,
how to till and foster,
to be a ladder, and a shoulder, and a hand
on ones head.
I heard him listen as he strummed his guitar,
and it sounded like the wind in the pines.
7.24.20
a little stream in the gulley
Backpedal
There is a kind of self-assured light
that reflects off a warm, polished kitchen table
in the late afternoon,
that can blind you,
if you want it to,
and through which
you can travel.
But only backwards.
Weightless and without effort, much like falling,
maybe, in fact,
with its own gravity, pulling,
memory
is wisdom,
and a trap.
Memory
is how he twisted and pulled
on the hairs of an eyebrow, sitting before a crossword.
It is a stone pond rimmed with quartz, no bigger than a table,
where you could watch tiny fish
circle under the ice you tapped with a boot.
It is webs in the barn caught in your hair,
a blue shag rug with a burn mark in the shape of an iron,
proof, joy,
a tin roof with streaks of rust, and a rope,
that dangled like a noose or a genie’s ladder
up to the rim of the sky.
Memory
is a sometimes beautiful lie, a fraud, a refuge,
a wound we won’t let heal, a ballast,
and all we have
with which to tell the truth.
The chain
binds us.
It binds us together
and keeps us apart.
It holds us down
and it lifts us up.
Wrapped in November,
in the cusp of night
cold inside the nostrils,
folded inside the arrival
of sweetness, moisture,
the comfort of wood smoke
and night sounds
not from my childhood,
those things
that never existed, or barely did,
or no longer are,
are brought again into existence.
11.07.20
spring still leafs out here
The Blessings of Small Things
It’s time
to greet
the warm hues of an overripe apple,
a little burnt by summer,
but ready for eating
on a blustery morning,
to greet an old cat and let her in,
to leave footprints in the morning frost. Intimacy
can creep up on you. Perhaps
it can only
creep up on you.
Until you think
it’s good that cups
hold coffee,
that milkweed withers
into a kind of parchment, flecked with mold, half decomposed,
that it wraps against your fingers
so you can feel
the velvet texture of the flecks of mold,
or the ridges that lift from the leaves.
I’m glad
there is still this smell—
moisture in the dirt
and the underside of leaves,
a temporary treasure
waiting to evaporate—
that I can
transfer through my body
the sound curled leaves make
like the head of a drum,
ready for tapping,
funneling wind.
Here there is an inside,
where music is made,
and here an outside
where we receive the blessing.
11.26.20
Between
The mist is pink this morning
through the little square window.
It’s not yet winter.
The leaves have not finished lying down.
The grass in the field is tawny, flat,
brittle when walked on. The kind that pops beneath your boots. It too
is waiting.
And sometimes we must. Sometimes
we are not of, but if,
no longer after, and not yet before.
It’s not yet winter,
but I’m ready
for cold in the fingertips, rain,
for wind
that hurts
and a pale,
clean,
clean blue sky. Empty
and without pretense. I would like
for it to be winter,
for there to be some agreement
between myself and the soil,
for there to be some
proof,
that it is not only I that am waiting, but that it
too for me
is waiting
with a premonition of green.
We must move, and move on.
It is a wish
and a betrayal.
We barely exist before we don’t, but life
is music, a beat, and we are pulled, released, we must
have joy.
There is nothing now
between you and me
that I am not.
Your love
is blood, is sap, sun. It is a river
that flows over and through me.
And like a river,
that love must flow
or die too.
It cannot be held,
but must again be given.
What remains is not memory,
but a gift.
12.07, 12.28.07