by William Stafford: A beautiful poem, in today’s Writer’s Almanac.
While the earth breaks the soft horizon
eastward, we study how to deserve
what has already been given us.
Love in the Country
Reply
Painting The Barn
Listen:
When he notices the change of light, he puts down his brush and looks up. He spent all afternoon painting, and the sun is setting fast. He is finished finally, just in time. His hand is getting numb and there’s an ache down his back, along the left shoulder blade. So he rinses his brushes in warm water, and watches how the light plans to go on without him.
The sun falls beyond the river, so that shadows move up the side of the gray barn. The last rays hit the eves from which he knocked an empty swallow’s nest with a pole. The building looks angry at his going, sad for his weakness.
The threadbare jacaranda in the field beyond the barn takes the dying light into its inner branches, becomes a skeleton. Before he can start the truck and drive away, it is haunted, beyond all hope.
* * *
Some nights, it just takes too long to get home. No matter where you start from, how clear the roads and whether, you just can’t get there fast enough. He stops at the market, buys a frozen chicken pie and creamed corn. He waits in line behind a woman writing a check, like she was transcribing Sanskrit from weathered stones.
He loves the night, when the world is drained of its color. All the heavy gradients, brush strokes, vast pallets of green and blue and brown recede to a diffusion of rippled pen and ink. He keeps the lights dim and settles in to watch old movies, surrounded by his walls of quiet swiss coffee.
At two past midnight, the angry gray barn with blue trim and languid shadows, appears in a dream and demands to be red again. Deep brick red, white trim, hinges and hardware stoveiron black. It wants to stand on the hill in the sleeping hay all night, then command the sun to rise, compel the threadbare jacaranda to leaf out for full summer, put on purple flowers and clash with the cobalt sky. A barn to make the crows wish for clothes like orioles and cardinals and jays. A barn to fade with happiness – tomato soup with too much milk – in time to lean against its many rust-red parts, and die on the hill. Gaps between the sagging boards will give the wind a place to sing.
* * *
He leans against the fender of his truck at dawn, drinking black coffee, watching the gray barn and the tree as the sun comes up and washes over them. This is what the customer wanted: a barn to atone with the landscape, make peace with the hill. “I want it to blend in, look smaller, farther away,” the farmer said. “My wife thinks it’s ugly. Paint it gray.”
Now he leans against the truck and thinks this may have been a sin, though not his first and maybe not his alone to bear, this time. An ugly decision, a thing not itself. But why should a barn get to be what it wants if he can’t? What he wouldn’t give for a proud brightness, a rich red rightness, and a solid hill, room for animals and a tractor, nails driven in posts for hanging tack and tools.
Dammit, it was four days honest work and money earned. There’s half a gallon left of Driftwood Gray. He leaves the can on the farmer’s yellow porch, along with his bill for the job.
Painting The Barn by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Week Without Salvages
A little over a week ago, I went for a walk and listened on my iPod to someone reading the last part of The Wasteland, What The Thunder Said. I thought to myself I will go home and write a poem. Something is stirring in the wind. But the stupid wind turned and blew it all away, whatever it was. I hate it when that happens.
So nothing good has been rescued from the horse latitudes this week. I’ve been very busy in other ways, and we’ve had some good rain and a fallowing sea with fair winds will come again. Until then, here’s some great poetry.
Looking Into The Heart Of Light
I’m working very slowly on a small flash fiction piece about color. It might be finished soon. So here’s T.S. Eliot, reading from The Wasteland: The Burial of the Dead and A Game of Chess.
We Are Not Separate
“A soul, dancing in and out of your incarnation.”
Poor Ducks
I should have been posting a poem every day during April, you know. And not necessarily my own, because it’s Poetry Month. But as the Bokononists say, busy busy busy.
Here’s one for today, anyway, and it’s a good one. Three Moves by John Logan.
Then again they sway home to dream bright gardens of fish in the early night.
When people ask us where we get the inspiration to let language run free, it’s from reading lines like that by guys like Logan.
This poem has been paddling and honking around in the back of my mind for 25 or 30 years. It’s confessional – almost literally – and transcendent at once; visual and metaphysical and 20th century fearless.
Between Storms
We had weather here this week that was fierce by the standards of the Santa Barbara coast. It put me in mind of this poem, which I decided to post.
There are two audio options for the reading. The first is with music fore and aft by JS Bach (Ah, Bach), at about one minute, twenty seconds.
The second without music, just me, at 46 seconds.
I would very much appreciate knowing which you think is preferable. If music (public domain source, by the way) doesn’t add value to the presentation, I’ll stop doing it.
Between Storms
Sad, how the clouds gather again
against the small hills
for reasons I cannot comprehend,
and how I stand here watching
the last boat carrying men
from oil rigs in the cast iron sea.
Sad, how all the gulls are home
asleep, having eaten all day,
how I see the shadow of the clock
on the water, its hands turning
from island to harbor
to the tender sand beneath my feet.
So sad, how finally I am rising up,
falling in a long arc
into the mountains of darkness.
Between Storms by Kyle Kimberlin
is licensed: Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
