Clouds, leaves, waves. 1987

1987

Zuni/ Goya

1.

A blank-- storming

in an eternal wind.

Looking back from the moon

to the earth as heaven,

the new hero is us,

a Zuni-- wind returns.

2.

The lines of literature

extend landscape’s distance--

coming back to a surface, flat!

Meanings are generated,

driven home --bang! 

the canvas figure, 

and stretcher as bone

the fabric as skin

A leek, a turnip, sop-- the earth

acid poetries, turning

blank as the death, 

we contain within

flags of the life, we project--

smashing those images,

Loud sound and, Push!

the surface!  the prize!

not trading in gold

but a finer sense 

in metaphor,

tinting a space...

cycling

3.

Indian twilight

rhythms of space in

skeins of consciousness.

Subjects line up in a narrative

horizontal journey

cataloging, ordering

stringing along,

swoosh and stripe,

5.

Back to front-- snap

to surface taut

attention

ta-- dah!  then flat, again

on one’s face,

no landscape of final truth.

spot of time, stop. 

Coming to surface...

6.

As God was real

the landscape 

anchored a reality.

As God is dead

the land floats afar,

but look,

a bud again-- this Spring!

...fearing I would someday 

tire of looking at this?

Sunset,

the whispering of birds?

7.

...dreaming a name, a shield

banging-- to light!

yellow flags! flash

awake!

The Indian said,

“where the bird stops, there the god is.”

looking for a universal

in the purple dark.

Life offering the possibility

to extend ourselves as far

as we dream...

...surging upward

breaking the surface

the prize grasped in his teeth!

Lights shine, mandala spins

all into one

a crystal light

flashes!

“This is the Truth!”

Coming from the darkness

still quite dim

we mutter, no--

still--

we stand up and shout,

this is it!

this, this-- Truth!

Clouds, leaves, waves. 1986

1986

Woman with Clothes Blowing in the Wind

a feeling of oneness 

with unknown mysteries

between the form and the content

this layered painted space.

separating figure

from place, or ground

not looking for hierarchy

but in the play between things

looking into the smear

a repetition of the beginning,

3.

Reconciling perceived opposites,

apprehending reality in differing aspects

of continuous and discontinuous motion,

the ongoing, texts of time--

and the frozen timeless moments.

for the gap between, 

the cognitive and the perceptual, 

in the valley we live.

Unconscious and sprawling

the paint itself finding figures,

a textual skein framing a

formal square (both framed and 

in between) a fabric 

seeking a surface, 

the blade drags the pigment,

close to the origin of paint.

8.

A new deeper space

opens goes back

gets distant

then, contradicted by an edge

banged back to a surface

(from a dream) reverberating

a present past is forwarded.

God, as the reality of this

picture plane, the death of God

and the break-up of the 

surface-- this imperfect reality.

the vagabond as the subject,

Achilles gone off

trekking

through the natural world,

attaching vision to striped grounds.

11.

Equating a self to this landscape.

The train winding along the sea,

thoughts gone over

through spume, then distilled

attached and coupled, moving

banging, snaking along

flashing there, here...

evening comes, things change 

as night unfolds,

new mysteries.

12.

Chumash Indians in the Sierra 

Nevada, at the time of Goya

painting, Women with Clothes 

Blowing in the Wind--

tumbling through Sierras in Spain

a dry warm wind of inclusion, 

swirling, whirling gyres of winding 

reeds, generators of thought

and shells transmitted

through a projectors beam,

shadows of figures

on the tent’s walls

the branches and stars 

were framed in the window, 

the negative space

came forward and the 

leaves went back--

the stars seemed

the atoms of the leaves,

all as one.

no sanctioned belief

the gardener gone,

night falls from the sky,

struggling out

to see what is found

I fear being a part 

of this Universe

passing through,

fear fitting too well

into the puzzle

figuring it out? I said, “I can see

the opposite just as well.”

escaping the horizon

looking back, 

from the moon

divisions of a planet, blur

into one.

19.

This sadness, a distance 

from the object,

an abyss we fall into as

the abstraction becomes 

symbol,

distanced from the object, felt

remembered but unseen

now, in the far

abstracting of dusk.

20.

The old woman’s clothes

blown in patterns like shells

thrown through beams of light,

whirling in a wind that

rushes through reeds,

Swoosh--

the stain of purple paint, 

peering into the layers

the striping wind in the mind, 

equating our thoughts thrown

on walls, gathering skirts

against the universe, 

on the high hill of an older time.

Back into the valleys, wandering 

the cord winding through the paths, 

surfaces toward the sun,

a certain satisfaction in

glimpses of a picture

to Behold!

Clouds, leaves, waves, 1985

1985

“..like a dream vaguely remembered...”

figures escaping horizon

dissolve into a swoosh--

accidental figures,

Goyaesque, in an inkblot.

romantic forest orgy of flesh--

on fire, the environs destroyed

turning to industrial belch, 

crazed by injustice 

to this earth.

“...in a dream vaguely remembered,”

finding a solace in the painted stain,

Two figures journeying towards a vase.

...from a hilltop among the pines

contemplating the lagoon and

stripes painted flat on the canvas.

through nights of grainy realities.

life rotating outward.

and I, a modern man in search of a soul!

Homeric glory and shimmer...

“that there is no end in Nature,” he said

going around in circles

all the year,

with the earth.

Clouds, leaves, waves, 1984

1984

Achilles/Tent

1.

The lagoon at night opens

upon the beach and stars.

darkest boasts,

the colors of Melville and Pollock.

5.

He was painting on the beach,

the canvas lashed down

against the wind, tar

clods mix into the paint as

slashing...

There, another whale, there, see!

our hearts--

are of this darkness.

Entering the tent, falling to tripod,

exhausted downward weight-- 

“the wrong doing of Agamemnon!” 

black eyes meld the wall,

sinking-- Achilles tumbling,

gasping at round about horrors.

a thought of --Thetis! Arriving, 

a hand to... head

and release, to peaks of tent--

universe and stars, shining.

The rocks of the beach, 

were like the reeds painted 

at the lagoon, elemental.

A theme silhouetted 

that we understood-- as

looking at Andromeda, 

the swirl in Orion’s belt, 

an off shore wave, tossed thoughts

like thrown shapes striped.

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Wallace Stevens


A similar poem to July Mountain, which the below woodcut's title took a phrase from.