By: Cynthia Pitman

Ars Longa

to Isaac

The weary artist, long unknown,
made his way down the hidden path
to the forbidden lake.
There he abandoned his brushes
on the shore
and knelt by the water’s edge
to rinse his pallet one last time.
As the colors began to spread,
the still water began to boil and swell
with the thick multicolored pigments
until it was like kaleidoscopic lava.
This versicolored spectrum,
reflected in the sky above,
surrounded the artist
in a panoramic frenzy of saturation.
He stood a moment,
then dove into the water
and began to spin and spin and spin.
He rose again,
and slowly went ashore.
He gathered up his brushes and pallet
and left, stained in every hue.
Ever after, to his art he was true.

Prison Sky

Late Sunday mornings,
we leave off paying penance
and congregate in the yard
for the miracle:
the stars, imprisoned by daylight, escape.
They pierce the blue
that shields them from mortal eyes
and begin to shine again.
We marvel at this blue shimmering sky,
its stars so bright they blind our eyes.
The vision retreats.
Only the daytime sky remains.
We begin our slow silent walk
around the yard in awe, humbled
by how such stars can so easily find freedom
from their bars of blue.
 

Truth

Under the spell
of the seven snake-headed shamans,
the stranger began to spread false prophecies
to the fallen people of the village.
But the sea formed a salty, gritty mist
that traveled to the village,
scrubbed clear the eyes and ears
of the villagers,
and burnt the lying tongues
of the seven shamans and the false prophet.
The people were thus left alone and free
to form their own understanding of the world.
Realizing this,
they wept.
 

In the Deep

The fishes hide their beauty
in the dark.
No one is there to shine a light
upon them and endow them
with wondrous glory.
They swim in the deep,
indifferent to what beauty
surrounds them.
Their colors swirl with the current
as they wind their way
through the cold.
They pay no mind,
intent on only one thing:
feeding.
The beauty of their world –
and what they bring to this beauty –
eludes them.
They seek only sustenance.
They have no aesthetic
that yearns for beauty,
no ego that assigns it so arbitrarily,
no desperation that values it so deeply.
They have no envy.
But without beauty,
neither do they have joy.
Only the cold dark deep
of their cold dark lives.

The Glassblowers

Inside the abandoned uranium mines
fires burn white hot and high.
Painted Glassblowers,
slathered in holy oil and sweat,
spin molten sand into sparkling light.
Shadows and light play
against their skin.
It crawls.
They add the rich blue of cobalt,
dug from the earth’s crust,
and the thick red of rubies,
mined from the ancient caves.
Their breath shapes this colored glass
into beads and bands
that will adorn the Oracle
and her handmaidens.
Gold, wrested from the Alchemist’s
fretful dreams, mixes with the molten sand
and swells from the Glassblowers’ breath
into precious vessels.
The Priests come, and from these they drink
the elixir of blood red wine,
a potion slowly fermented
in the deep tunnels of the mountain.
They savor its taste,
seasoned by the salty sweat
dripped into the vessel
by the Glassblowers.
Feverish, they mumble their incantations.
Then – all is quiet.
Slowly, the Priests retreat into the dark
and return to where their dark paths
take them.
The Glassblowers spin their blowpipes
and begin again
to breathe beauty into the rituals
of their world.