"Echolocation"

 
 I watch myself seeing, looking

at pictures, the Facebook raison d'être.

*

eyes sit at the front of the head, near the middle of a face;

at the back of the head, a digestive organ

where the mind ruminates on what has come

to cloak the meaning of "Friend"

*

and the face of this window, transparency 

broken by projection

~ what I see, what I am, is not what is seen,

not what I am to you ~

*

however much I open

my eyes, my mind, my heart, my ears,

and open my throat to voice

a sound to bounce back

*

Echolocation 

 

Summer Heat Waves, or "Where I've Been"

Growls and clatters -
tractor engine plows the damp air, heavy

as if an ocean occupies these hayfields.

A dark day lacks shadows, elicits

reflection from within; the inner voice says simply, "Paint." 

* * * * * * *

"Heat Waves," #1 through 10. All are 8 x 10 inches on paper; watercolor, gouache, colored pencil.

 © 2012 Ravenna Taylor

Final Hours of the Final Day of My Favorite Month

What "Darkness" Looks Like:

What "Silence" Sounds Like:

Tell-tale Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was time,

and we took our time to find it; whereupon

it was defined by its absence,
decreasing supply -

an absolute need for additional time.

By then we'd made time's value high,

and the value of using it too.

LaoTsu said: To live long, be of no use -

My time contracts; its uses for me
expand. I'll see no end, until

The.

Ravenna Taylor, Heat Waves #11, 2012, watercolor, gouache, color pencil, 8 x 10 inches

Either Way

sometimes I wish to confess

sometimes I might succumb

sometimes I am too small

I swim in my self-made lake of aspirations

short of respiration, buoyed by inspirations

all of it, everything, lapping

at an edge I might not reach

I lack

I swim

without my glasses 

I'm nearsighted

Ravenna Taylor, "Either Way," 2012, oil on linen over wood, 5 x 7 inches

Stepping Stones

Last week I completed a drawing, and it happened to be the last page in a sketchbook I'd been keeping since 1996. I keep multiple books, of course, so that's how one can last so long. I thought it might be interesting to post the entire sequence of 24 drawings; these are not great photos, but just an animation, of sorts, of my visual development. If one were to go to my website [here], whether the "paintings" section or the "work on paper," it would be readily seen how many of these correspond to works in oil or collage -- although in some cases, drawings are made after the fact, as a way of moving on from that image into another.

I Take the Back Roads for the Views

I don’t talk much, usually, and
hardly at all in the morning.

I enjoy the sensation of emptiness in my mouth.

Words eddy and pool;

they submerge my larynx, so my thoughts can swim.

I live in a woodframe house, and wake with windows open. There are birds’ songs, and the dragon-y exhalations
of an early hot air balloon dropping into the adjacent mowed hayfield. My head is still clouded by dreams,
images of past and future,

people I’ve lost, including me – 

The balloon comes near, the birds go silent.

My tinnitus whines,

there is only so much of Time.

I keep an appointment near a large stone church, with a clock that rings the hours and half-hours. I hear the hourly chime, then the dongs: ten this hour.

Each dong is allowed to spread out and thin

before the next is struck, so reaching ten takes more than the moment to read time on my cell phone –
maybe enough to watch it turn from 10:00 to 10:01.

My breathing slows with the dissipations of the dongs. I feel something then,

an awareness, a sensation

of being pushed by the pace of my life,

pushed right out of the space and the time I take up within it.

I drive the back roads.

Over a sea of wheat, three clouds,

long white rafts in the sky, all going my way: home.

My thoughts take a back road too

-- I’m thinking about the movie “A Single Man”; I’m thinking how little I wish to be in his position.

Pressing on --

An oncoming car strikes a Gray Catbird; I watch it roll across the windshield and tumble to the double yellow line. Hoping it might only have been stunned, I turn back to move it off the road. On approaching, I see another Catbird come, sit on the ground near for a moment, then fly off.

The Catbird is limp but warm, soft; its eyes still bright though unfocussed, slowly closing and growing dull. It is all
in a slatey gray, with some russet at the vent,

and a tiny bright spot of blood on one leg.

Its life left;

that’s what I saw unfold in my hands.

What did the other bird see?

Another creature might not see the body at all,

not as the being, just as more of the world’s matter.

When animals regard a dead body, some

seem not to see the body once the life has gone; others possibly do.

I wonder if this shouldn’t be part of the nomenclature of a species,

the way the mammary glands give a name to our class of animal:

We are the ones that mark time and the endings of hours;

we cling to our matter even as we rush headlong away.

I know the road and the flocking there.

Because the other birds are watching, I put out of my mind

the thought of photographing or taking home the bird to study it. I can

do nothing but put the bird safely at the base of a tree, and continue home.

Outside, I walk

past blueberry bushes to the pasture.

A Catbird is being pestered by her four fledglings,

all pretending to need her help feeding.

She lifts from the fence rail to a tree's branch to scold.

left: sumi ink; right: drypoint with graphite

sumi ink, 3.5 x 5 inches

sumi ink, 16 x 20 inches

oil on masonite, 4 x 5.5 inches

pencil drawing

oil on panel, 10 x 8 inches

[All the above bird studies were executed during the 1980s, when I lived in San Francisco and made frequent visits to Ocean Beach, the western perimeter of the city.]

No More

This evening at twilight, I went outside to watch the fireflies emerge from the grass and the trees' twig-tips. The hayfield to the south of my house is edged with trees and brambles, with a spring and a creek on one side, and a boggy place at one end -- this seems to be a favorite hang-out for fireflies, and I look forward every year to the first half of June, when they peak. They are near but not yet at that peak tonight.

I watched and played with my little camera, to see what it could record of the tiny quick flashes of light they display. There were sounds of frogs, crickets, birds, all with their own rhythms.

I also could hear a tractor, even as the night was washing in. The large farm adjacent to ours grows mostly hay for horses now; the two brothers who own the farm are quite elderly. One of them, I remember, when I first moved here, greeted me at the Post Office, "I know you! You're my neighbor!" He told me how old he was, and was proud to still be working, and fit as man 20 years younger; I told him I was amazed by his vigor and hoped I might be as strong as he when I reach his age. He was pleased, because he knew it was true.

Tonight, I heard the tractor running as dark was coming on, and I could hear my neighbor's son saying loudly over the engine noise, "Stop. Turn it off. Stop - no more! -- I'll do it -- Let me do it!" Then again and again, stop, turn it off! But my proud neighbor was not stopping. He was going to work that field in the hastening dark, until the little light from the twilight sky, fluttering with fireflies, was not enough. Only then, no more.

"Leaves Of Grass"

POETS TO COME

Poets to come ! orators, singers, musicians to come !

Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,

But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than

          before known,

Arouse ! for you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,

I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the

         darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a

         casual look upon you and then averts his face

Leaving it to you to prove and define it,

Expecting the main things from you.

~ WALT WHITMAN

Delaware Township, New Jersey, on my way to the studio, June 2012