The best art inside or outside, Max, always makes me see the outside world
differently and you bring that across well here. Particularly like the
squirrel whose entry into your vision reminded me of their ways of moving.
You round it off well too.
Bill
On Wednesday, 13 April 2016, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> 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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