Shorter Posts – Page 15 – John Michael Keating

Study for “A Portrait”

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My names are not important, nor his. I am a mystery he has loved for years. We swim in the sea together like twins in a womb. When he forgets that I am present within him, there is no joy or laughter in his life.

I feel warmth from the sun and a breeze from the sea that brushes the curtains against my skin. He tells me Winter will be here soon. But I am indifferent to hours and afternoons. Days pass into years without my notice or care. The towers above the cliffs will crumble into specks of powder and drift in the wind. The cliffs will plummet back into the sea.

I am beyond passing. My hair has never lost its glow. My waist will not thicken, my breasts will never sag, my beauty does not fade. He will die, like all my loves. I will not. I am as old as I will ever be.

Cloud Cover

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For Tierney

Sometimes, in darkness, wings sprout from his
shoulders like clouds and he soars above the birds
to float on invisible rivers of air.

Sometimes, a wide valley of geometric fields opens
beneath his wings, breathing in its green skin,
as full of life as he is.

Sometimes, a river threads its way from mountains
to an ocean waiting patiently at the edge of
some other valley far away.

Sometimes, he rises above the mountains and drifts
above the next deep valley, hidden underneath a
membrane of cerulean clouds.

Sometimes, full and overflowing, he flutters
down into the world below the clouds hoping:
If only, if only I do not have to awaken.

Ripley Moon

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It is nearly dark, a new moon barely risen. Perhaps a storm is coming; perhaps it has just passed. Lights along the shore suggest the presence of humans. What are those faint grayish shapes in the darkness of the trees? It’s nearly too dark to see. Houses, perhaps? Something else?

Like many artists, I feel frustrated by the surfaces of things. So I slow down, breathe deeply, pay attention to what I see. I draw and paint as realistically as I can because I feel that if the image is not realistic, people won’t believe it. But if the surfaces are too believable, it becomes difficult to suggest anything behind them—deeper strata of meaning, perhaps. How to paint an image that is a kind of door that opens into another, deeper world we sense is present, but that we can’t see? How, as Thomas Moore writes, to reveal the “inner realm of things without depriving them of their concreteness”?

A sense of the imminent power of Darkness is what I wanted in this painting. Rilke says it well in Das Stundenbuch: A Book For the Hours of Prayer, (translated by Robert Bly):

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
Shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

Perhaps someday I’ll be able to paint an image that opens the door. Meanwhile . . .