Just received some poems from one of my favorite poets and all around awesome human beings in the world, Bill Scheffel, of Boulder, Colorado.
SILT
BELOW A SKY OF CUMULOUS CLOUDS and shades of early evening blue, a photograph of William Faulkner show the steady, sad and mysterious gaze of his eyes, how open and willing they seem. He’s much younger here than when he received the Nobel Prize — his acceptance speech is in the back of the book, 723 pages south of the photograph. The book sits on a table under the apple tree whose spent blossoms break in occasional wind gusts and litter the table and deck. A car door slams and dogs bark. Faulkner's hands are crossed and he holds a cigarette, or maybe a pencil — the book cover ends there so its hard to tell. When a human being develops a depth of understanding the left eye begins to yield, to also look in, becoming more like a window than a camera. I can see this in Faulkner’s eyes. It’s his right eye that is sad in what it has seen; above it his eyebrow slumps like a cascade of plundered wilderness, stolen land, slavery and a thousand lesser griefs. The left eye is free of pandemonium, free of clutter, free of commentary - it neither offers nor rejects. In the pool of his dark left eye one cannot distinguish the pupil from the iris, but conveying the soul of a man is not merely a matter of technical details or adequate light, as Rembrandt proved so well in his self-portraits. Faulkner's left eye seems beyond personal age and cultural memory: Boon and Caddy and Corothers McCaslin and the dirt roads of his childhood have all passed like silt in a spring river. We’ve had more rain this April and May than the last two years combined and there is an explosion of green everywhere. The clouds are darkening and birdsongs continue unabated.
17-May:03
BRAQUE
I.
His paintings resist the narrative of memory and the literal: the tablecloth in the painting Pink Tablecloth is red - the red of stopsigns and tomatoes. The red insists the eggs, plums and windowshades obey. Spread out like a beach or wide thigh of red. Red that refused to stay in the tube, shouting from the left and the right: red, red, red.
II.
In his journal he writes: I go my way and continue doing so and that's all there is to it. He paints the textures, the open grain, the living patterns of wood - draughts, lightening, downpours. Wood laid open by the saw, sanded and hammered at, then re-seen and brushed onto the canvas: a clamor of grain and mysterious knotholes. The wood that surrounds us in our homes, accepts the fist we sometimes pound or becomes the shelf of the library that refuses to warp.
III.
In 1911, he sits in his studio and plays Beethoven on a child's accordion, his expression impassive, with large and sturdy feet. Around him is all he will need for fifty years of painting: cheap guitars, smoked-out pipes, chipped porcelain, a dinner plates - stuff you could buy at a junkstore with a fistful of change, but when seen in daylight is steady, adequate, and flawless. When he paints, a chair becomes noteworthy not because it is made of the finest mahogany or designed by the best craftsmen but simply because it has four legs.
IV.
He could not paint a face, a body or even a landscape. Were they too difficult or too loud? In a still life there is no noise, no movement: candlesticks, grapes, the slab of a table. Wallpaper gone out of fashion. The ubiquitous guitar. He burrowed into these things like a termite chewing slowly, as if each brushstroke must be made silent. His studio was so quiet it might have been a cave: even mortar fire or the streets of Paris in 1944 could not disturb it. Can you imagine a television set? In the end he is like everyone: an old man with stiff shoulders who walks with his hands behind him. Yet the wrinkles of his trousers are perfect. He did the work of those particular angels who show us each thing is lovely. That to manufacture things simply so we can later throw them away is to cast ourselves, along with our mountains of trash, into hell.
Bill Scheffel
17, 18-June:03
