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
