An Office Walkabout – Page 5 – The Writings of Loren Stell

Beach Shamaness

Looking up from unframed canvas on a street vendor’s blanket, just off Costa Rica’s white sand, I thought you whispered. Now your green eyes continue to break silence. Enchant. Looking down, mermaid, your red hair stays combed, crowned with a lily
the color of your lips. Underwater, a conch shell sea phone perches in your left hand.
Three reef fish bubble by. An unruffled red rooster eyes the festivities. Art evaporates
air’s urgencies. Soundings, enigmas, meanings levitate from the deep.

Art Latitude

The same four self-portrait eyes crisscross this desk and heart. My high school
and art school artist son. Questioning all forms, moods, movements they survey.
Quadro-stereopsis—a living CAD program seeking insight: what’s in and out
of sight. No answers—better questions. Decisions flow into actions capitalizing all we know.

Rider

Angel of death, for fifty years you’ve trotted a white horse up seventeen
office walls. Today I notice tears, running down your cheek. Gift of a friend,
who smoked half his life away with funny cigarettes. If etching makes echoes, even you black angel, might be touched by his sadness. Watching the spasms
of his infant son, “each jerk a petite mort of a two-year-old brain.” Helpless
to stop the slow erosion of what he wishes for his child to achieve—enjoy—
the seizures, are like acid spots that eroded blank plate and created this print. Side-saddle rider, how can you ignore the murky fumes of sorrow?

Tokyo Shadow/Masks 2

Japanese nobility centuries old, how many mysteries you continue to guard. Gift,
after a three-year sojourn in Asia, where my son lived alone, your phantoms form
an entrance stance, a kaleidoscope welcome for past selves, present personas.
Make a home for insight. Re-sight what’s been. Discern what’s becoming.

Elegy for Alia

Irreverent, vibrant spiritual guide—Alia died before her time.
We, honoring her, placed a swan-sized crystal in a white forest
of lilies and peonies, amid a flotilla of tea candles floating
in an oblong bowl. As we circled the memorial, a haunting
female voice sang the heart sutra—over and over. Sanskrit
looped through adz-hewn rafters of the barn she’d taught in:

Felucca’s Sisters

race on before the storm. Off turn-of-the-century ragged glass negatives.

Off overcast Connecticut. Gaffing wind like you first did along the Nile.

Tacking through elemental turbulence—pushed against, even as you’re buoyed. Unlike the world’s first sailboat that only took Anthony and Cleopatra downwind, we’ll hoist a halyard of woven questions strong enough to sail hauled tight in any squall. With fear battened down we’ll tact through psychic crosswinds. Chart between reefs using relational wisdom.

Masks 3

An African monkey—given in trade for therapy—comes
from a tribe known to worship a white-pallored deity—
long before whiteface Pierrots hit Paris. Its merriment
endorses the marrow within imagination and karma.

Masks 2

Spanish-folk-carved alabaster, mouthed ‘Oh’ for six decades
overlooking New Jersey’s rolling hills. Brought back home
from WWI, it surveyed the old soldier and his college professor
partner, gentleman farmers unencumbered by propriety.

Masks 1

Sanding the beak he’d just finished chiseling, Juan
pointed to the first-growth stand of trees nearby
in Tocuaro, a flashback of old Mexico, where his great-
grandfather discovered fine-grained carving wood.

Psyche’s Pentimento

As you enter, receive a bow, an Asian custom, my hands praying you in
from where you were to where you are. Assume a greenhouse intention
in the wall’s pistachio pigment. Your first step is liminal, watched over by masks.
The Carnival sun, once danced in Rio and moon face-molded along Florence’s Arno. Daylight’s yang, night’s yin will cradle the twoness inside us and around us.

Category: <span>An Office Walkabout</span>