Brushstrokes and Motion

There’s more to it, though, than color. Color is only one part of the song. Another part is the texture, the dimensions of mind that go along with touch. Touching this. Or touching that. Humming. Texture as a thread, as peaks and valleys. As directions of the wind as it blows. Roughened and smooth. Near and distant curls and rows. Lines. Farm fields and orchards of rows. Undone mounds and streams and rivers. Currents and alter-currents. El Niños and magnetic poles.

There are colors and then there’s the waves. Radical, or anxious ones. Ones that turn into flowers, or tastes and tales. Ones that whisper stories. And sometimes a wave is a length, but not always. Like ommm. Like a vibe, a vibration. Sometimes a wave is not long at all. Sometimes it’s just a breath that gathers us all together. The blink we never notice. The space inside a place like “i” in the beginning or the “d” in the ending. The pause the moon makes before disappearing. A nothing after a word. Or maybe like us the length goes on and on unwavering, and so on and so on and so on.

I am captured by waves of white. Snowy cliffs. Zen sand mandala. The trails gulls leave along wet beach or nomads etch across desert sands, headed toward oases. Deer antlers and gazelle. Penguins on glaciers. Dolphins leaping and sailing for seconds like birds through the air, or even swimmers diving or slender gymnasts arching, curling into forward rolls. Clouds holding on to light slivers of sea. Milk. But no mother. A child perhaps. Milk spilling into canyons. Lost children. Milk singing. Bathing the bodies of seekers like waters of the Ganges. Is this ecstasy won, or one as in oneness? Is it the grace of hard laboring? It is no nirvana with uneven lines. Milk that sits atop the mountains. Sweet milk. Buttermilk. Sour milk. Curdled milk. Milk that swirls slowly counterclockwise like hurricanes in the southern hemisphere. Milk that wants to rush headlong over cliffs like Niagara but cannot. Cannot move beyond its own border. And meanwhile is the child hungry? Is the child afraid, in the dark, embraced by orange waves?

Orange waves almost drip, in ways that white waves do not. Politely. Quietly, defying the bright color of screams. Almost thinking of clots. Hemorrhages, the color. Color of Jericho’s trumpet blaring in your lungs. Uneasy breaths. Cat hair and pollen. Thick smoke in your bronchial branches. But texture timid as earthworms. Mice. Blood vessels under skin. A random, perfect circle. A mother extends her arms to hold the animal while the father watches. Mountains in the middle of milk. Night in the center of mountains. Milk that sits below

black letters tattooed across the Atlantic.

“AR” with the “E” missing? But “ARE” what? And who or what “ARE?”

Or “ART,” the cousin of Joan, as in “ARC.” The visions others cannot see. The voices they cannot hear. The grand curves of one’s life, looking forward or backward as it moves, shimmering like a rainbow. The path of celestial planets or beings across an evening sky.

The cousin of Noah, as in “ARK,” and all the animals are coming. Rain falls day and night and the waters rise. And we are surviving.

But one would surely want their cousins in these uncertain waves. In the mind’s eye. To be in one’s memory. To be on one’s tongue. In these northern waters that freeze overnight and leave one forever stranded. That leave one for eternity in only one place. In someone’s house. On someone’s wall. One would surely want to say to their cousins “I perform.” “Do you see me?” “I, performance.” “I, the gift.” “I, ART, FOR” someone, for you, “UM, UM, UM.” But for who? Who are you? The passerby, glancing in my window, the small glow of my lamp allowing you to see me? The voyeur in the house, looking out as others pass? Freezing me like a ghost in a blurred photo?

Look, look, look! But never get too close. Close enough to smell, or to touch something. Close enough to lick me with your tongue. And you, Joan, and you, Noah. Can you help me?

And in this quiet darkness. In this blackness I hold everything together. Just try, if you can, to find the waves in me. To find the sea in me. Just try, as hard as you can, in any imperfect light. I am the body you must return to, in order to walk away whole. Milk and mountains. Breastplates, jackets. Earlobes and feathers. Ribs, ladders. Mother and child. Stand because of my center. Stand because of me. My wings, calmly resting. Nothing turns without me. Nothing rests its head on its own shoulder. See how quietly I have risen, almost like the moon. See how pure I am. Pure as panther fur. Pure as silhouettes of trees holding towns and cities together. Just a little something, you know, I learned from Cassiopeia.

Me, blacker than Joan. Blacker than Noah. Me, black black not Black. Blackness. Me, blacker than charcoal letters burned into a canvas. Burned into bluish skin. Burned into not-exactly joy. Into curiosity. Me making milk and tiger lilies into a new The Thinker. Into a perfect thinker. Into new beauty. Into a beautiful thinker. Then you getting lost in me. Or maybe you getting found. Me, in the center of irises, darkness, flowing into pupil like a flame.