The Time Falling
Bodies Take to Light

one of five panels
80x20" acrylic on doorskin,
Fall, 2003

(The title is taken from
William Irwin Thompson's
book of that name.)

I can explain my paintings in the way
I learned from doctors.
The emergence of the fourth way,
The hairy paw of Jacob inside the belly....
An epileptic lightning seed burns
whole between the chambers....

The hanged man dangles from a cross
shaped tree. The tower's fallen
as sacrifice to end the pop-up man
while others of the gang of four
go freely without gall.....

But then I feel as if I were some sort of voyeur
or possibly invaded. ...
I feel Freya stolen.

In the sea paintings I’ve been
painting over last year’s angry battlefields—
then painting out the once green land of Afghanistan,
painting out the land between the two rivers,
painting out the land just near the garden of Eden—
She appears —Freya, the valkyrie
who bore the warriors to Valhalla
where the honeyed mead-sound
formed their amber knowing

Now she drags legless people from
the desecrated land. Fewer bodies, they say,
but untold harm they do unto the land itself...
agent orange and god knows what
else still emitting fumes.

And Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon,
burns on a pyre built to calm the angry winds
and set them straight. How can that wind,
the breathing of the spirit, be my own?
Agamemnon sold his daughter to Artemis
so the sky would open at his Own bidding
And his Own ships set sail from the beach
so he could cross the sea to Asia Minor,
so he can sail to Troy.

Shall I wear a hair shirt for their memory?
Or trace the contour of my pomegranate stain
between the mounds of bills and contracts on the table
as I spray the line out with the perfumes of the forest.

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