by Stephen Mead.
Take the pain out of painter. Take the pain out of painting –
No need for Guernica. No need for Orwellian warnings, cautionary.
But how to choose bliss this time with so much awareness of the other?
How not to channel suffering and still have catharsis,
a breakthrough by ordinariness, senses attentive to the miraculous moments
of just being alive, earthbound, revolving, while so much simultaneously
the excruciating claims?
Energy begets energy even as loss denotes the presence of love
as a haunting astronomy for the system no longer grasped
and maybe never released by forget or time.
Nothing matters really, a pop song may sing,
queen-famous, anyone can see, existential in belief,
but even black holes crush stars
into an absence that lasts galactic through wormholes as yet
beyond the science of discovery.
That is existence universal, a massive sand Mandala
of such painstaking grains, the colored dust patterns geometry,
monk-ritualistic, for the mystical ocean to take as a cleansing
wave upon wave.
So too our are ashes molecules, a dissolving everlasting
where anything can happen as if in a daydream
real as some neighbor’s dwelling next door is also a possibility,
sun-baked, those bricks rectangular of orange and red,
an architecture of comfort in real time reflecting
autumn leaves wind-tossed up and down the street,
or going out in first snow’s blankets of quiet
before city salt and traffic turns it slushy soot.
Root for that like a poet without a poem
but at peace with the world stirring still
in asters, goldenrod, snapdragons, milkweed,
in larkspur, hollyhocks, coneflowers summoning
monarchs in migration, a planting for feeding,
these winged things endangered
being yet nature’s art,
being creation creating.