It was March 1994. I painted a scene:
a valley from high above, ridges all around,
into the far blue mist an eye could flow.
First the outlines were brushed on
then the shades on top, bright
exaggerated, full of morning. It was the last
painting that I would ever do, even though
for months my colors and palette remained
in-studio, the redolence of linseed oil
as thick as stone. Never picked them up again,
except to put it all away somewhere
in the attic. That piece hangs in a mountain
home now, a reminder
of absolutes,
of beginnings, of endings, places to which
I’ll never return. Some days still
now many years later
these hands smell like cadmium women
who sat for my portraits.
Another Season of Would-Be Husbandry
Winter whittles away
and I’ve done nothing with the grove,
done nothing to clear a space for me
in that gathering, where
a tarry calls. Besides,
other things have distracted me again.
I crave this hermitage
but it resists my come-on,
it shuns me in favor of a rising neglect,
it vacillates between a desire to be
forest or pasture, grass or
branches. It can’t be both, so it’s neither,
taking full advantage, dangerous.
Time, events and peril conspire,
they ratify a spindly philosophy
of letting things go,
and I appear
the advocate.
L. Ward Abel is a lifelong poet, composer of music and spoken-word performer. His poems have been published widely in the US, Asia and Europe, in print and on-line, including or forthcoming in White Pelican Review, The Pedestal, The Reader, Versal Two (Netherlands), Texas Poetry Journal, Open Wide, Poems Niederngasse (Switzerland), Southern Gothic, Juked, Identity Theory, SouthLit, edificeWrecked, Muscadine Lines: A Southern Anthology, Kritya (India), and many others. Twenty of his poems are featured, along with an interview, in a recent issue of erbacce. His chapbook, Peach Box and Verge, has been published by Little Poem Press (2003). His new book of poems, Jonesing For Byzantium, has been recently published at UK Authors Press (2006). He lives in his native rural Georgia, USA, cultivating his latifundia.
