'Keystone'  oil on linen - 2017-19 -  48wX60h"

Intended to swing freely from a single wire with: ('Mobile' the image on reverse.)

A bustle let out its cry for attention at the other end of the bar

Enough that all the arrows of the room straightened to meet it

In our corner, and without a bending eye

a gray sailor leaned on the share of his mind

‘Here’s a claim tumbling down

about that shifty place between

cliché and the profound

Like when you’re not quite sure,

as I’m sure it is you’ve quite been before

whether there’s a fellow figured out a thing important

or thinks they’ve latched their hand while grabbing at the stars.

There’s not telling till it opens,

though some things open slowly’

At that the man whose clatter rendered the room’s pose

Recited so:

In the center of things

there is a pressure

like a force

which is invisibly quiet

it pulls on every person

though in pulling it can push as fast away

to rebuke it is its affirmation

-nothing unusual about that-

(his eyes jittered in their moment’s self-appraisal)

but

it is egoless

as far as I can see

though it acts in ways we would all relate

it is even nameless

the very definition of strange

persisting in all things

I painted it once

just now in fact

on a napkin here…

(though it feels like the slightest peak

into an ancient continuity)

like accidentally drawing back curtains

and dousing the lingering embers of curiosity

with a barrel of oil

to temper into smoke

we know only once we’ve seen it

and know from the sight of it

that it is never the same

and always itself

(ridiculous, like reality, is a necessary portion of magic)

it has no name

but marks itself

or is itself marked in being

as having a kind of mortality

though alive we wouldn’t carefully say

dying with the death of things

is all I guess to pin it.

and with that the bluster crashed out of stillness

and the room wobbled with its rhythms back into spirals

but if you looked past your sight you may have notice a little hole

prick itself a spot in the air

though it would be too small to tell where

the sailor groaned as he lilted back to settle

‘the quakes of the sea are signaled out a bucket of sorts. 

Mostly we’ve swept them off board when they spill

Best bet is to pick your spot

And catch the wind.

Best bet.’