POETRY: REWRITING A COVENANT

REWRITING A COVENANT

“You have your paintbrush and colors. Paint Paradise, and in you go.”---Nikos Kazantzakis

It would have to be a clear canvas, and all the walls a limitless

expanse of nothing. Yet.  My easel could turn or slide in all

possible directions, my palette a saucer of rainbows. 

These are my terms before I end up in a heaven or hell

not of my own making: that I would be a child again,

wild again, unbridled in conjuring my own quaint realities 

where realities match quicksilver dreams that shape

and reshape themselves however I fancy them; that I

would be free of the shackles of meaning or the ghosts 

of language as their intolerable gaolers in dungeons

where there are no keys nor clanging cell doors to open;

that I would have all the sunrises and all the sunsets 

under my control, and all the days of my life kept neatly

folded in drawers I could open and reopen for change

when I itch from sticky underwear and not have to curse 

the padlocked building laundromat; that I would be free

at last to work at a burgeoning poem or a canvas whenever

I start one and not be constipated to leave it unfinished 

because days would not be long enough, word processors

not fast enough for my careening thoughts that must see

their tail and catch it while running to fill all empty vases 

of lives and loves as meaning of what meanings would

have been if my life meant anything at all. But does it?

Paint your paradise, I am told, and in you go. But I can’t.

---Albert B. Casuga

05-23-11

Painting by Gustave Corbet