An Office Walkabout
Now that constitution, age and family won’t let me drive, stick it to me!
Not like a stiletto stab. Just ease the burl into my wobbly grip. Gnarled
beauty born out of a tree’s distress. Polished waves of pain like mine—
if going lame shines.
An Office Walkabout
Walkabout on this continent of days and dreams.
Look at these objects—daemons—lining shelves and walls.
Lovely, once lively.
Found or made.
Hanging with me —inside me—wherever I landed along our butterfly migration.
Moving haven, re-shelved wherever I lived.
A surround where patients—mutual sufferers—
unmask hell and heaven.
Inner and outer.
An Office Walkabout
plucked out one-by-one. White down. Drawn on black paper. Floating between right forefinger and thumb, penciled in seconds, by the left hand. All ten thousand four hundred and eighty-three feathers. A long masquerade celebrating the airy insulation
of dinosaurs evolved 100 million years before birds took flight. Before pillows encased plumes, as head nests for any who might dream of an uncomplicated world.
An Office Walkabout
In this Scorsese/Michelangelo pieta— Mother Mary or Mary Magdalene—
enfolds the lolling body. The movie flickered over Harrison Burn’s studio
from a small box TV. Burns, dying slowly himself of chronic illness, stood
before his easel daubing oils over canvas and taking snapshots of the video.
Mixed-media squares quilt surfaces. Mary’s cry shatters all pretention.
An Office Walkabout
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.
An Office Walkabout
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.
An Office Walkabout
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?
An Office Walkabout
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.
An Office Walkabout
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:
An Office Walkabout
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.
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