Transparencies

Momentarily I became soft, not soft exactly but like glass become thick liquid, melting, memories of hot silica, pliable, and if you knew you could reach your hand through to the other side to Alice's Wonderland.

Through the glass; through the invisible world.

It didn't last; edges returned,
and I continued on.

                                                        

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From Untitled

A long, slow process, clearly. While I don't yet know who these people are, I'm getting to know them. In a way I like this as is, the whitely drawn figures on swish of black paint. But colour inevitably beckons. Now that I've learned how to post large images in small packets, you can better see what's there when you click to full screen. This image is an unbelievable 1496×1872 pixels and is only 292KB!

                                                        

Night Vision

Steven Kenny, The Wing, 2005, oil on canvas, 40" x 30"


Ah, Icarus... what was he imagining? Rising and gliding like a bird, that he could fly to the fiery sun on his golden wings? Did he immolate himself for that vision, which trapped him in its promises, drew him on, puncturing his skin with the shafts of feathers like hypodermic needles filled with a distillation of fantasies that made him feel invincible, like a god?

When he flew, it was with night vision.

                                                        

Jack Gilbert: 'Failing and Flying'

A poem on love in The Writer's Almanac this morning, coming from an extraordinary place of wisdom:

Failing and Flying

by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

"Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Reprinted by The Writer's Almanac with permission.