Period Piece

CF 1 40 x 30 cm acryl on canvas

PERIOD PIECE

The merely random doesn’t interest us anymore.

Like a Hollywood actress, its measurements never stay the same.

We’re thinking, in the short term anyway, of using fractals.

Who doesn’t feel like doing something timeless for a change?

Ride in a hay wagon rumbling through flowering countryside

and a surprise

for I think I do see Tess Of The D’Urbervilles

pinned to a lean-to 

by a savage relation.

I’d like to rescue her. But as fate

would have it—this is Thomas Hardy—

all we can do is wave goodbye.

A  middle-aged artist of trembling “equanimity amid uncertainty”

dares to mix paints on his teenaged wife’s convulsive belly.

I’d cast a younger Natalie Portman as the young wife/model.

And a much, much younger Nick Nolte as the artist. But that’s impossible

so forget I mentioned it.

Like a butterfly of rare beauty,

a soft fluffy moth, she opens her bodice. Screen test.

I despair that we’ll e’er find fractals for those

   lovely, lovely…

…a sound of brocade, lots of brocade,

ripping on the roses in our uncle’s garden.

What exactly do you mean by “negative capability?”

And where are the spider monkeys

uncle Albert brought back with him from Tanzania?

They are strangely beautiful, and possessed of a rare grace

that gives me much comfort in these troubled times.