KATHERINE JACKSON
Learning to Sketch Carmella's Garden
Sun, clearing the rooftop, whitens a soil-patch, builds geometries of shade
against the shingles while roses toss from a lattice, flaunt their difficult
hues. Pinks, greens. Greens are the hardest - those in the box, ready- made,
won't work for a leaf or stem - you mix them out of colors of earth, sea,
and sun. A spade, shoved in the loam (hastily, from the look of its tilt), glints
where digging has polished it. Someone could use it - and the pitch-fork,
near the edge, as of consciousness, of their picture. We learn to include,
include, nothing is sacred, all fair game for these rudimentary stabs,
pastel-thrusts, not of meaning, probably not of art, more likely of pleasure,
in the shape of facts so often overlooked. See! they blend, one into another:
sun into sky (Carmella is fetching a hat), leaves into soil, a great drenching
of photons pours these color-objects: bush , waU, path, back door,
cactus - spines and aU - in a pot, once the eye meets , the hand or voice speaks
them, hand, voice, eye, mind, and yes, Old Sol, who crosses our path with
well-timed indifference, the casual spilling of ancient who knows in a garden
there is no fixed perspective. Thoughtless.within our coronas of thought,
we rub and crase, ply and apply, rose madder, Naples yellow, phthalo blue,
anything but green: we are planting now, we are photosynthesis. In the hour's
meridian, we smudge our deliberate smudges, our own recognizable, ancestral
bodings, leaf-clumps we have carried within from the seed of our own
planting, figures for knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge, as the mind
twists upward and outward, away from itself, craving the sun, yet poised
with the earth's curve, seeing and scene, in the welter of green of its mixing.
JAMES LAUGHLIN
In
Old Age
The pace of time changes
And is strangely bifurcated.
Day to day it races along,
Too fast for enjoyment.
The sled is careening down the hill
Toward the big oak where it will crash.
But at night, as I li e sleepless,
Time seems hardly to move.
Each scene that passes through my head
Is almost stationary,
Often lingering longer than I can bear.
