Daniel
Carrington will be featured at FPL’s off
the page poetry series in May of 2015. Below you will find Daniel’s poem The Painter. Upon invitation he also contributed an
Afterword, original to From the Reference
Desk and meant to add insight into The
Painter and his creative process.
Daniel
Carrington is a Houston-based architect and poet. He is a lifetime member of
the Gulf Coast Poets and has been a three-time Spotlight Poet at their annual
Poetry Out of Bounds event. In addition, he was featured in Public Poetry’s
2013 Summer/Winter Reading Series and has been selected as a Juried Poet for
Houston Poetry Fest in 2010, ‘12, ‘13, and ’14, and his work has appeared in
each year’s anthology. He is currently working his first poetry collection
entitled Mosaics of the Night.
THE
PAINTER
ours
is a fleshy fruit
beneath
overcast skies.
by
contrast, the bad apples
with
which we battle
are
like gnarled fists and knuckles
under
the hard sun of heaven.
those
sharp shadows that mark
the
orchard floor define a dark aspect
that
sits alongside simple pleasures,
as
mingled as the palette of the painter –
the
fields of gold and crows of black.
much
is made of this fertile crescent
in
which we grow and go to seed,
but
what I know is such that
the
canvas weft might hold it
if
it were not a crime to even speak it.
it
is this:
let
us be grasshoppers, you and I.
what
the industry of insects makes
is
a social apparatus, a levee
or
earthen dam against which presses
an
eager water in which we sense
no
enmity, no joy,
just
the business of overflowing the valley
to
renew the land through violence.
(Originally
published in the 2010 Houston Poetry Fest Anthology)
AFTERWORD
“The Painter” wasn’t
published until 2010, but its earliest drafts date back to ’06. Writing this companion piece gave me the
opportunity to go back and reexamine those initial brushstrokes in an effort to
help any interested readers better understand my process as well as my personal
take on the overall composition. (This
is the point where a *SPOILER ALERT* is warranted, though I’ve tried to leave
some things to the imagination.)
The poem is grounded
in actual events of that not-so-distant time, though to betray them would be
like exposing a canvas to prove it’s there.
It serves best discreetly but, much like the events I allude to in the
poem, springs to mind at the merest mention.
After all, what battles? What
levees? It’s enough to say that they
served their purpose (in the narrative, if not in reality). Add to that the withering pace of my workload
at the time, and it comes to this: I was tired – plain and simple. Art, however, is rarely either.
If there is any
refuge at all though, I find it in art, so from this very real but somewhat
oblique starting point, the poem ventures out into reverie, into a landscape
awash in beauty but feathered by dread.
And it was here that I paid a not-so-subtle homage to Vincent van Gogh’s
Wheatfield with Crows, a painting as
much framed by levees as the painter himself, stricken as he was. I like to think there was a measure of solace
for him inside his frames. But there
were also the crows. They’re just
impressions of birds really, reduced to a few sublime brushstrokes. If one were to look closer, they might
realize that it is us who color them with our omens – a hallmark of our
duality, those inescapable oppositions that define us.
It may be reasonable
to acknowledge hardboiled truths, but I find that reason is seldom reason
enough. Recognizing a fact is not the
same as reconciling with it. And it’s at
this point that the poem turns on itself.
Weary as I was, having come to this place to find respite, it’s easy to
resent reminders that all is fleeting. In
that sense, I think my invocation of Aesop’s fabled grasshopper was more
hyperbole than a ringing endorsement of slothfulness. It’s a plea against extremes made in the most
extreme terms – proof in itself of the limitations of reason.
Ultimately, the poem
does not offer an olive branch though, not to mankind and certainly not to
me. That I perceived events unfolding
around me as adversarial is a fault of perception on my part. Time and tide will always imperil our levees,
and our intercessions in this world are impermanent at best. To simply understand that wasn’t enough for
me. But by embracing it, I made peace
with the Painter.
Daniel Carrington
Other Poems by Daniel Carrington:
