a long goodbye 3

Dear Friend, I fancy meeting you in a very crowded street in an intersection of peoples when the red light turns green and everyone including ourselves rush forward to our own elsewheres. 

The preciseness of things will allow us not to see each other unlike the way one morning on a particular June day I met again at once four people in a corner paces away from ---. 

One I was with about two years in my early twenties with no love lost between us at parting. One met in the late twenties leg of whitewashed paintings. Another through her large scales paintings of cats and flowers. The fourth mere hours from an airport. 

What are the chances we meet again? Together in a spot as if rehearsed sometime somewhere. If at ten dreaming in California someone tells us we will commit suicide at 26 and have PhD at 36 and then be half way around the world bearing a kind of slowness of

Being, that there will be sunshine and sea and we will wonder if this is still life or dream. Why should we not fancy multiverses where in another life some things did not happen and all these merely a child's wondering. A child still must be dreaming elsewhere 

On a bed with starships taped on the ceiling and midmorning flooding in a roomful of books. Or must it be a dog, one of the hundreds of strays in a Catholic country with least love for the least. I fancy hectares of land where dogs run and not only dream. When I move 

From one place to another and meet people and memorise faces in spite myself I fancy meeting them again in another life. One where hurriedly passing the crisscrossing pedestrian lines we are less estranged from ourselves.

We must have met the same woman on the same day

An hour shy of a full day, I find the note you tacked on the wall
It has a picture of a tree where you met her, the woman sometimes
Called Fate. I reckon you noted your conversation about the same

Time I read in public, while accompanied by a painting, poem
I've written about her, and the bush, and the snake. Such happenstance
Did you ask her why she stayed where she'd go

Not for the first time I see the wall and knock at the cosmos divide: 
You, there
I, here

And our notes free on a boat bridge under moon and wind.


























          

half a morning

away from the calendar, it is easier to pretend an endlessness.  an easy-ness of being.  this morning, i cut the flowers growing from the basil.  the flowers were beautiful, but the basil will die if they are let be.  i talk to the dogs who have the gift of contentment.  they are lucky.  yesterday, there were strays at the streets and i thought, someday i shall be a fosterer.  not now, not yet, when still preoccupied with the many things that speed time.  who ever said life is a race, and we are all racehorses?

at the conference, someone cried semi-feudalism and nearly raised a fist.  it started with the talk of horse-rig system.  an old way that lingered, half-dead, into the present.  and the word she cried so confrontational.  the large room was quiet.  no one said a word.  not everybody agreed.  i thought, why worry about men?  worry about the horse.  who cannot say a word.  who cannot have a god.

this country has a history of gods.  It is standing on a huge island of a God.  everyone prays.  too many claims.

Jayvee asked me to write something to close his exhibit on transcendence.  a one-man show of 3x4 paintings of acrylic and mixed media.  layerings of washes and drips, transparency in monochromatic whites, blues, grays.  non-figurative sense of the form.  i finished this morning, while the sky is in September downcast.  the news earlier was urgent about war and a mass burial.  i also wrote Jayvee a poem.  not one of us mentioned a god.













  

palimpsests

some days ago, two young men made a performance called "white wall".  it was made of a white sheet held high and wide, with two cuts on it where the men placed their lips and talked between themselves.  the audience were meant to overhear.  their conversation short: about how nothing signifies something; how something could be anything; and anything, nothing; and how even nothing means something; and something, anything...finally the men ended their play, possibly out of breath chasing their own conversation's tail.  i thought about bertolt brecht.  and waiting for godot.  someone from the audience whispered virginia woolf.  i said nothing, thinking of the young man who thought of the performance.  how difficult it is to be "new" these days.  how the world must be older than we think.  older than it lets on...

yesterday, a korean artist brought out her painting of a girl whose head was lost inside the clouds inside an upturned fish bowl.  the goldfishes swimming on air outside the glass, swimming beside her ears. her other painting was of a girl with extra large rabbit ears.  surrealism.  how she recalls dali in the background of her figures, in the strokes and colors she chose.  how her portraits call frida in the length of her women's necks, the slopes of their shoulders, the immobile staring of their heads. 

today, i begin reading The Portland Vase... 

 

  

 

 

expression. of peace.

after red


i tell my lover i am going to do painting today.  i will go to the hardware store and buy the paint brushes.  flat ones intended for walls.  those that are meant to color.  and are unapologetic.  i do not care if sio montera says not to use house paints.  that they are not meant for art.  great or otherwise.  i will get a few pieces of good wood.  some nails.  a hammer.  a white canvas.  and build myself a frame.  large.  and rest it on the wall.  i have a stroke in mind.  it is blue.  and slightly convex.  concave.  when seen from the other end.  center bottom thrown to top far right.  i mean it like a wave.  of something else.  maybe a part.  of a circle.  even though it trails away