Waking God

“The virtuosity of the great masters is something that evolved over the years as they grew in their ability to translate what they saw into paint. One of the most distinct characteristics of the most virtuosic master, whether we look at Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt or even Jon Singer Sargent, is that their early work is much more detailed and finished than their later work. In their early years they obviously couldn’t capture what they saw as easily with their first touch to the canvas, but had to work over the painting several times. However, even without the deft brushwork, these paintings are enormously successful, as well as very personal.”

Kurt Anderson, “Realistic Oil Painting Techniques”

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Dear Alex,

I sketch several bad versions of a tiger face for my first time tonight. Virtuosity in reverse.

On scrap sheet I drag my charcoal along stripes with variation in longevity. Some tapered softly, another flowed in wave bolder, each exquisitely solitary in branching out from a common stem or arc - vector without direction, lifeline beyond grip.

These stripes are reincarnated in art, science and zodiac to mark for attention or camouflage, rarity or stereotype. Even the terrain of Saturn’s moon mystifies us by the name, “tiger stripes”. They whisk us away through underground tunnels, deeper still into fissures of melancholy, dark matter, matter darker from stark memory, winding to an areola in time.

Last Winter around this time, my sister read my blog for her first time in my room. She asked if I had been sad. Why write in bleak strips of words, thoughts in disarray, stripes to spikes?

Tiger stripes emerge without endpoints from pores, sprouting to be seen yet hidden, shedding there and where no one follows, following you in and out of fashion and fiction, on pathway and in no way less intimate than the creases of your sole.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

Vancouver snow; traffic fiasco.

This morning three men unstuck the bus I was on, with shovels and brute force they brought with them, seemingly on their way to make what is pocket change to button-pushers such as I who has the learning and leaning to blow up the world but not the valor and fury to set it right.

I penned a few drafts to tell the story but at the end decided to honor them with no more than verses I wrote real time while they were setting the world right.

God Smells Like Alcohol

Behold the sinner man
Drunk with sorrow 
Wrongs done him and he requited 
Soft blue squalor 
Waiting on the pain of the world 
To wake God from his slumber

Yours, Alex