Inside Outside
Having climbed its hill, why should I
enter the Asian Art Museum
except to enjoy, admire -
and fail if I tried to emulate -
work so far beyond my powers?
Outside, the green hilltop park:
lakes with ducks; wide, far
vistas to sea and mountains;
old trees, surely the town’s
widest-spreading cherry tree -
speak directly of what, inside,
several eras of Asian arts
celebrate fully, modestly.
All outdoors presses on me
its beauties - grandeurs, even,
worthy of the art indoors, give
or take a buffalo or two.
The wholesome artlessness
of the natural! - the well-planted,
tended, pruned and watered real!
Locals with earnest easels may
well lurk where just now I can’t see,
rendering each their honest view.
(Strollers exempt themselves from fresh
attention, as their cellphones flash.)
Mainly I feel these land- sky- sea-
scape panoramas unframed are
unframeable, certainly way
beyond the current verbal
resources at my disposal.
A middle-distance silver flash
shapes itself into a squirrel.
Outdoors provokes art appetite,
stirs ambition, only to beggar
the impractical artificer.
Let it all pour in on me,
pondering the Puget-Sound
tsunami my wife assures me
will follow the due-any-day
(or worse, -night) Great Quake.
Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’ frames a safe
exquisite Fuji; quake and great waves,
she says, will take most of Seattle.
Though from here I can’t see it,
shapely Mount Rainier awaits
on its near horizon whichever
cataclysm may come first, its own
fated eruption sure, except its date.
What pours in on me - too phlegmatic
to imagine ruin - is sunlight
merely, brightening all the ponds,
lightening the evergreens’ cones,
tinting my self-darkening specs.
Everything ungraspable moves
faster than eye or aging mind - or
calligrapher’s hand? Well, an old
culture has its codes and formulae,
confident stilled re-presentations
of the quick. I’d better go inside,
flashing a smile and Senior’s card.
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