PREFACE TO PERHAPS

If I can't stop looking with fascination and bodily joy at my 2 new paintings, especially the larger one over the tv set with the black and white commingling aliens just touching lips to forehead in a gesture near tenderness, then perhaps all my obsessing about her and her art, her painting really which from the very beginning delighted and amazed me, and then the loss of her sharp and sudden like a steep unseen cliff where you step stupidly a stride beyond any semblance of a secure edge and freefall for good, forever, down to the scrabble and fragments of geology far far below, then perhaps this craziness is the wind thinning off a desert mirage or the distant ring of fading bells sounded by thirteen nomads riding white horses over shape-shifting dunes of sand and sedge, and then perhaps my absorption in painting last night or the morning before or whenever the fuck it was that I finally pushed past the deep cut of this depression and smeared color with camel hair across an already completed rectangle of canvas has given me something of a return to warm mud and leafsprigs of flowering azaleas and the fragrance of wet Douglas firs and Spring in Oregon, and if I'm real lucky, home.

Yes, the paint and the night in solitude, air saturated with the chemical smell of bitter turpentine helped me feel placed, complete and safe, like home even in the small funky apartment with dirty blinds and poetry books and birthday cards heralding both a new era and our mortality filling 2, no 3, shelves of this one slender packed bookcase. Home.