Only Four Colors Left
Clumsy painting of the Self must turn
Into itself and away from vague
Proclamations and generalities
Concerning what it means to live and die
But who would know what we
What I face going into the landscape
Again and again?
Like bitter birds waiting for the scraps
And arthritic hands in the park
Who knows how the snow stops
Coming and coming pushing cars off the road
Or mixing polarities with gray
gray air?
Mine is the issue of the landscape
Not the pattern
It is the slant and the break and the wisdom
Of hills becoming mountains becoming
Slopes
Valleys
Gorges
Sneaking near fault lines
Spraying the open mind with replicas
As contours of itself
For itself
My landscape is not what it used to be in the streets
Of the edge-cities
And the homes with books
Tables chairs windows looking
Seething to keep ties to real sources
Like the forest for the trees and the wind
Against the pane
But years later the slanting debris of jets
Pushes me out of bounds
And regulates my sinking feelings of visions lost
Visions missed
I’m supposed to go belly-up I guess
With the news that freedom is dry and brittle
Like twigs within the hall of trees
Within the wider view of summer
Conflagrations
Like warehouse windows
Or city craters exploding for the snow
And pot hole crews
But in hesitations before the phases
Of the moon
And personalities confessed to me
Through wine and cheese and model
Behavior
I want to gloat in the air of
One thousand spring-summers
Compressed into canvas
For the voyage out
— by Douglas Pinson
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Copyright ©2009, by Douglas Pinson. All Rights Reserved.