Love
One of the most natural reasons to make art is to contain, anchor and preserve for all time the huge feelings that go along with being in love.
My invitation to you: think of someone you love (doesn’t have to be romantic love) and create some art that comes out of that feeling. Celebrate the specialness of this person, and the intimate experiences you have of deep interiority and zooming into the details of this wonderful being.
My examples: love poems.
~~
I.
Green eyes like two lakes
in a map, with many colors,
painted with the gouache set I got.
I haven't used them in ages.
They are sitting in a wooden box.
I collect supplies, as though
when the power lines fall,
I will be ready with many paintings.
If I were to draw out the map of you,
I would use every color,
a bit of gold in everything,
peach, rose, and the colors of light.
The uncapturable colors of light.
You are strong in your body.
If I looked at your skeleton, it would be beautiful too
stripped of its names
looking just like many other skeletons
hanging in classrooms or stacked underground
or pleasantly dissolved
into white powders, fitting easily, homily
in burial grounds, under Indian Paintbrush,
and colossal valleys, as shelves of shells.
Out at the islands. You want to know what it's like.
Well the island fox pulls back her lips
from around her teeth
to eat the prickly pear. She has nothing else to eat,
because the oaks are rutted by boars,
who eat the snakes,
who ate the mice that the fox used to eat, before the snakes were eaten by the boars,
that doesn't even make sense -
wouldn't there be more mice, if the snakes have been eaten by the boars -
in any case this is lost down some crack in the mind.
What I remember is how there is nothing but boars and mountain lions,
restless, who sometimes eat the boars,
but mostly stalk,
through the grass, along the ridges,
looking over the water -
why wouldn't they enjoy that
just as much as we do.
II.
You are far away from me now, but still i perceive your body
whole and floating, as it was in the dream when i met you.
Salted, watered, flowered, mineraled,
recharged, rebalanced, recreated.
Upwards is blue and smoky gray, you are under a spray of stars,
cottony, roiling and shifting as you are roughed around
you are swimming even though it is nighttime
with a circle of warm-blooded finned beings
who are smiling at you in some way
which cannot be looked at directly, only felt.
Do you feel for me then, in the water, reaching
for my body near you
sensing me with you
don't forget me
i am in the blood pounding in your ears
loving you with each breath you force out
united
III.
The uncanny thing about you is,
I met you one night, when I was asleep.
That is, I woke up, and you were next to me,
close by, hovering and silver. The love was simple and easy
entered me from the crown
and bloomed out inside me, with a pale
flash, joyous.
Now you're sitting there,
locked inside a body
patterned in there, knitted into it.
Grey eye, green eye, blinking at me.
You're inside there, I know it.
~~
Thumbnail image reverently stolen from Lin Wang’s illustrations for the Crane Girl adapted by Curtis Manley