SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

Spots on a paint rag trying to figure out

if they’re part of a larger picture.

Daubs and smudges and smears of black and red.

Topographies of dry thick ridges of blue acrylic,

peach-coloured mesas bruised

by the encroaching violets of dusk in a painted desert.

Are these the wanna-be windows of life

who failed to achieve a whole and harmonious view

of what they’re doing here swiping off knives

thick with the gore of cadmium red,

cleaning off brushes that get to go out

on the field to caress and poke

stars and trees into being? Waterboys, not players.

I say the word, life, and I feel tonight like

the heaviness of a bell that’s supplanted my heart.

The right root, but the wrong blossom.

Even though I’d melt that bell

back down into raucous cannon

to defend the concept to my very last breath.

But tonight I’m tunnelling under the foundations

of the cornerstones of life to bring

the walls down on top of my head,

like an avalanche of prophetic skulls

to just get a peek inside the grand paradigm,

the white light of the gessoed underpainting.

The secret garden with low-hanging fruit

on easy street with the sacred whores of Babylon.

An existential sadness, deep as a death-wound,

as if I’d just been stabbed in the heart

by the hands of a clock that mistook me for an intruder,

undermines me from below, a pyramid built on quicksand.

As if all those who had drowned in life

like fish up over their gills in water

were swimming in the watershed of every tear

that almost makes it up over the top of the dam

I try to throw up like a manly front to what

I know I won’t be able to hold back for long.

And there go the villages in the flooded valley

I tried to live among like a neighbourly mountain

come to Muhammad on the way up and down.

It’s cold and lonely and the air is thin

at the peaks of experience, with only

a star and a cloud for company.

The hard diamond in the rough I used to be

has grown mushy over the years. Tears.

Imagine that. Warm, salt seas with undulant tides

of emotion coursing in and out,

the way we breathe, the way we live and die,

unite and separate, pour our shining

down an inexhaustible black hole

like Parthian gold into Crassus’ mouth

in the hope of efflorescing like the bird fountain

of a better world on the other side of hyperspace.

Armed with some decent human attitudes,

and a few that are wholly out of bounds,

no reason my mind can catalyse out of chaos

that I should feel the sorrows of the discarded colours

on a paint rag like the afterbirth of the universe

that’s gone on to greater things than road kill.

I feel the deep grief of widowed eclipses

and the creeping shame of sunspots

that were born into a maculate caste

of estranged birthmarks on the forehead of a lighthouse.

Space is warped like water by some unknown

disturbance in the pond. And I can’t discern from here

whether it’s a crack in the dam

or a birth sac ripe enough for its waters to break

and wash me out to sea like

the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked lifeboat.

I hear the lilac whispering into blossom.

I see the starlings building their nests

in the corners of my third eye and the spiders

weaving mandalas between the witching wands

of the aspen saplings trying to transcend their roots.

Still, time seems studiously impersonal

and more matter-of-fact about suffering

than perhaps it really is. The mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds. As they say in Zen.

And I can see so clearly even through this cloud of unknowing

the kind of world I’d love to live in,

giving it my full assent in peace and contentment,

as long as I never lost the hunger that desires these things

and no one else had to live like a ratty old towel

abused as a paint rag by the shroud of Tourin.

Yet I can’t help feeling I’ve spent

my whole life trying to piece a lost constellation

back together again from leftover stars

that don’t have a clue what they’re shining amounts to.

In the stained, marked for life, castaway things of the world,

in the eyeless dreams of aborted inspirations,

in the twenty million dollars an hour we waste on war,

in the eyes of the twenty-five million children a year

who are starving to death globally in civilizations

based upon agriculture, I’m looking

for the trashed masterpiece of a paint rag

soaked in the blood of hemorrhaging roses

that might have parted our eyelids like the Red Sea

or a gallery on opening night to a vision

of what they might have done had they lived

to do things differently and their genius and beauty

not been squandered like blood for oil

or the waters of life learned to mingle more olaceously

with oil slicks in the womb of the dark mother

like an alternate medium of creative expression

that wasn’t shunned like the evil skin of a shedding rat snake.

There’s an expanding emptiness in my heart,

a vacuum nature abhors like a miscarriage

of what I hoped to wake up to the day after tomorrow

like the smile of an enigmatic Mona Lisa

that didn’t die in childbirth married to a banker.

What faces reside in a paint rag

I might have fallen in love with at first sight,

what mind, moon, sea, sky and landscapes

might have sat on my easel like windows in space

that might have shown me a way out of here

like the eye of a hurricane at the end of a telescope

that made things at a great distance appear

larger and more astronomically intimate than they seem

when no one’s trying to paint the other end of the lens

by wiping their glass slippers off on the grass

as if the princess just stepped into a mess of Hooker’s green.

Disoriented hues of colour blind rainbows, who knows

how many faces have been wiped off on a towel

with the big, sad, musing eyes of luminous gazelles?

How many cardinals nesting in red cedar trees

were wiped off the canvas like lipstick on the moon

when the sun went Puritan, midnight at noon,

and scourged the scarlet letter of the kissing stone

until nothing was left of humanity

but the purged shadows of an abstract divinity

that burned a hundred thousand women

foxed out like witch hunts in the seventeenth century

at the stake of a principle that stood up to the flames

like the backbone of a heretic

with a streak of Payne’s Grey in her nature

slashing at the orange sunset

with a painting knife in her hands

at those who resented the concupiscence

and dark innocence of her sacred body and soul

and saw her go up in flames

like a bouquet of sable paintbrushes

stacked at her feet like the pyre of the phoenix to come.

Sooner transform the emptiness into something

as absurd as it is meaningful, than ponder the waste

of a good mirage trying to look

for real water down a wishing well.

Sooner try to patch the tear in the sky

that rips me open under full sail running before the wind

and lets all the stars come pouring out

I was saving for a rainy day, with a paint rag,

a discarded face towel sadder

than viridian pine trees in the distance

with an aerial perspective of pthalo blue

gentled and blanched by the intervening atmosphere.

That said and done until the sky drys

I’d rather wear the patches of a compassionate clown

like paint rags on the Sufi blue of my cerulean robes.

I’d rather walk in a pauper’s clothes to show

my solidarity with the cast offs of creation,

not just finished canvases with artsy attitudes

in stiff upper collars and colours

that match the wallpaper like seasonal mood swings.

Sometimes it breaks my heart from the inside out,

it guts me like a tube of alizarin crimson

to see all these fledglings strewn at the foot of my easel,

my tree, my loom, my lean to, like the paint rags

of crumpled, ruined, leftover lives

that couldn’t quite make it as flying carpets.

But I’m not going to forget the ashen sorrows

and habitable earth-tones of starmud

under the winged heels of inspiration.

As for me and my zodiacal house of ill-repute,

my renegade observatory on the wrong side of the tracks,

I’m going to ride this wavelength of light out to the very end

where the wildflowers open

like the complementary loveletters

of a colour wheel, a rainbow come full circle,

unbroken just for them.

The donkey looks into the well.

The well looks back at the donkey.

Art. Life. Zen.

When the line turns round

the donkey at the end is in the lead.

Yesterday’s bleeding paint rag.

Tomorrow’s aesthetic creed.

PATRICK WHITE