Cloudskinner

CLOUDSKINNER

An old artist in a garage studio,
gun-metal cold in winter,
tin-roof hot in summer,
mixes brilliant paint on his palate,
takes animal bristles rubbed short,
and creates a cosmos.

Behold
his awesome private galaxy,
the mountains of his mind,
the timberline of his heart,
and the clouds of his soul.

Clouds,
dark and heavy with rain,
drenched scarlet from the sun,
puffy as cotton candy
with popcorn faces,
thick shoulders and rippling muscles
of mist,
peaks and valleys,
deserts and raging seas,
pregnant with thunder,
tongues of lightning;
herds of shaggy elk,
their heavy hooves flashing
across the knees of the sky,
all
captured on canvas.

The make-shift studio is cramped,
with the smell of fresh fruit and gun oil
blending with muslin starch,
musty magazines
stacked in damp cardboard boxes,
old leather boots,
a sheepskin jacket,
sprigs of pine needles
pungent with dripping sap,
a branch of sagebrush,
several short chunks of barbed wire,
handfuls of wildflowers,
and summer dust on the pane
of the solitary window.

Outside
the concrete crept closer,
and plastic protected people from pollution.
Inside,
the seasons were of paint,
and a lumberjack was ruler of the sky.

The power in his paintings
were sheer brute aesthetics,
untamed, raw, bold, wise, crackling,
flowing free,
making the placid observer
into a vibrant participant,
at one with the artist's world,
blessed by his visions
and his presence.

Dark decades from today
when we are but a wisp,
merely a thought in the minds
of those who loved us,
that old artist's power will still
exist;
circling the globe gently,
molding clouds into images,
pounding them into pictures,
sculpting them into kings
and mountains and castles and oceans and forests
of the air,
yoking them into a muslin harness,
creating a great snarling team of steam,
that stretches out far beyond
mere life,
to a beautiful place
that only he can see.


Glenn Buttkus 1977