Landscapes

Passioned Fertile
Fragrant Wild
Virgin Madness
Blooded by hunger
This is a landscape of my birth

A Market Fair
Flat and Far
Untidy, Busy
Messy Mismatched
Patched and
Somehow Saved
This is a landscape of my day

The graceful arch of a bay
A shimmering of leaves in a coastal breeze
The promise born of sidewalks aching from the sun-warmed days
Conspirators of an evening yet to come
This is a landscape of my night

A sunrise grazed by sands
Duned by whispered winds
A watery and golden path
Fair and unknown
This is a landscape of my hope

But there are brushstrokes yet unpainted
And images untainted
In another landscape
But there are palettes yet uncolored
And hues yet undiscovered
In another landscape
But there are vistas yet unseen
And views yet unperceived
In another landscape

My own: So

No… Virgin Forest:
Lest Rousseau be reviled
No… Long Awaited County Fair
Lest Wickersham be wasted
No… Bay of Angels
Lest Dufy be defiled
No… Sunrise between Two Headlands
Lest Turner be untasted

Those are those artists' landscapes
And though I owe to them a deep abiding debt
Yet
It is not to honor artists by
Reproducing their vicarious flaws
Instead to honor their attempts at mirrored truth

The grand escape and the glory of them all
They faced the barren hopelessness of empty space
The wasteland of a blank canvas