and a crimson of cardinals burdens the birdfeeder, five crows—one with a hiccup
that follows its every caw—come harassing, the cat who wanted out wants in again,
both wood stoves, upstairs and down, are coughing and choking, and the ink in my
pen’s gone cold.
artwork is charcoal—the real stuff, right from the hearth—on charcoal paper
I wrote this years ago as a creative writing exercise. It’s a little quaint, but I think there’s something here worth saying.
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It wasn’t from anger or frustration, but from passion and pressure and overuse.
Picture a cutaway view of a room, like a medieval painting of a monk’s cubicle, womblike. The light is dreamy. On the tarnished floor sits a black swivel chair—sometimes it is a throne, sometimes a hard stool.
At present it is a stool, and on it sits a body, bent and laboring. It is a man: he is an artist. Above him hovers a cloud, and in the cloud swirl myriad colors and shapes, images, vagaries and histories, questions and definitions and elusive unknowns. He takes a swipe at the cloud now and then, and like a wide-eyed child after a firefly, brings the brush down to draw it across the empty surface before him. He does this defiantly at times, at times with uncertainty, but always with quiet anticipation.
And there it appears: a thing once invisible, to see. Proof of intellect, of desire, of pain perhaps, of love.
It is the most brilliant spot in the room.
But look! See the spot spread, watch it grow; it washes over the astonished artist, spills across the room; it appears greater than even the cloud.
The cloud grows bright too. Sometimes it swells. But sometimes it rains gloomy and dark; sometimes it shrinks, almost vanishing completely.
Yet the artist works on and on and on.
One day his weary hand breaks—his work-weary, gnarled hand. He bandages it up.
But how the cloud grows, grows to an enormous height, towering over him! So he straps the brush to his bandaged hand, and once again plunges and plunges and plunges into an ocean of turbulent hues, storm-wracked, severe under northern light.
One day the brush breaks. It snaps on a rugged landscape of a face: a commanding, crowded brow filled with concept, and stained-glass mysteries of eyes.
The artist is left with his broken brush, splintered at the heart and hanging by an impossible shred. This brush that conjured magical fog, ran across glorious hills, sharpened life into focus, stirred a vast sea of spirits.
He wraps up the brush—wraps it and wraps it as with a shroud. But underneath the wraps, the brush remains broken.
The light is fading in the cutaway scene; the room becomes lone and silent. The cloud blackens; it rains and rains and rains and rains. It rains until there is no more rain. The cloud is gone.
But the brilliant spot is propped up in eternity for all the world to see.
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I’ll be taking a break from blogging for a few weeks in order to meet some deadlines.
I bought this card in a used book shop in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Today, as I watch the snow fall, I’m thinking, The future might be good for used book shops, considering the current condition of the book industry, indeed, of the economy. But I’m also thinking, We will always want stories, no matter the form.
Artwork © Glen Baxter, 1986, the Bug House Archives