There is only
the half light left,
a little rosy section of
sky it's a mistake to
behind the meandering
popcorn contour always think it's all
of a nearer cloud. or
nothing. It's part of
Different, slightly
heavier purple grays the mechanism of disconnection.
of nearer clouds
and subtle chiaroscuro of
pink
brushed in behind the
sky.
A fog, a thin fog
comes around the house
mysteriously costuming it
and almost has me tasting
the light
with the Polaroid again.
Fergus and Liam
at play is the small
field, just below the pond.
How their voices carry
as if we were indoors.
The rose almost gone now.
The glow in the west is
gone.
A tiny bird just flew
intimately close
unfolding what began as
forthright squawks
into a flowing,
syncopated, rapid melodic tear
Dizzy Gillespie would
have been challenged to parallel.
What do sensations have
to do with words?
Said a poet, “a
substitute reality, more real though.”
How to avoid
representation
and still convey
“the
sense of participation in a flowing onward”?
That in black ink he
cannot replace him there.
In the desert, the
domination of the elements,
here, the domination of
other species. Here
a little patch of coarse
ground
with two small strands of
a weed
that came up and produced
small, fernlike leaves,
turned mostly crimson
through the stems and the
leaves
with a few white needles
positioned
here and there
a few leaves still green
or partly [muted] green
see in the warm yellow
light
that also lights this
page.
Turning itself over
in many little movements
the question:
how does art find
what's small in this
glut? Small, whole, in this glut?
Another poet's notion: “A
true account
of the actual.”
Now they are really
letting go,
the frogs.
Huge rubber bands being
snapped,
of various sizes
plucked to brief ring,
rapidly damped.
An impressive lightning
bolt, lateral,
just above the tops
of the great spruces
behind the house.
The house with its
taxonomy of windows,
backlit panels.
Two are arched, two are
square.
The rest are rectangular.
The tops of the windows
align inexactly.
An amber hue dominates in
their glow,
continuing across the
field
of most of them,
though two at far left
are the robin's egg hue
darkening to an obscure
gray
gradually to the left
one's
top left corner.
Paul
Baumann
