Missive For Darkness As Vocation, William Hawkins In Mind Poem by Warren Falcon

[after viewing a film clip of the American self-taught artist, William Hawkins1]


1
How would you now depict it,

even a corner of it?

paint as in
the film,

busy with the making
of it, belly's too much,
needs thinning, haunches
trimmed too to size, or
not, concise seizure of
eye and paint dependent
upon hands, monumental
concerns aright or at least
perspectives private
suffering amidst, against,

or in the teeth of, daily
concerns taken on as
ultimate-form,

it is

visual commentary, response
imaged, is backyard ruin put
to good uses, kindness extended
in hammer's claw on cast
off wood, it is Crow near the
barred door, and with heart,
with heart meds, provide limit
to dulling descents, may then
find again's Desire, may plunge
further/deeper, deeper still,
into muck magic of shorter
days given in winter, in the longer
nights generously dumped,
portion/proportion control
upon the human,

such occupies, with familiars,
allusive smears, serving now
and ahead who will partake of
the offering, who will be held
healed in their beholding

nuanced in cloud swatch,
in land swath tumbled.


2
I once, your other darkness, quoted Hopkins
to you, seasons of dryness2 upon the bitter pitch3
amid discovery, 'What I do is me, for that I came',4
not a text for self worship but, rather, an assent
to keep world woe personally felt in that greater
perspective making poems from orphan woe,
from ever furtive grace eluding, then surprise,
in bleakest place, sudden braced, parses newly
in the greener green of things pleading still,

'O thou lord of life, send my roots rain'.5


3
In the shorter light, the extended night of cold
and star-bright questions, may you cast clumsy
net forward into what it all might mean to fretted
you, to me, stretched, though I will not thrust
these words any longer upon your brush or paint
but make offering with thanks for your own work
to feed us through the eyes, perhaps time to mount
that horse and soldier on or to fall off again, gain
Damascus perspective yet, from one's back watch
vision distort the massive horse into a God receding
into necessary darkness foregoing image in order

to see what may form in the spreading dirt,

what resurrection there is in the smell of paint.