My grandfather, the artist, Earl "Sky" Carpenter, read my first unpublished novel, an existential Western titled, BLACKTHORN, and he, of course, loved it. He had been painting incredible oil paintings all my life; hundreds of them--but he had never painted one just for me, his "favorite" grandson. So he decided that in between his other pressing paintings, he would set "my" painting over on the side of his studio, and he would paint on it as the feeling came over him. It took two years for him to complete it. It was my everything gift, something for all my birthdays, for all my Christmases; my treasure. He painted characters from the novel, and put them in his high mountain imagination. I was very touched and honored and I felt compelled to try and describe the painting, the bliss, the eternal gift.
SKY IMAGES IN PAINT
On opposite knolls,
the ancient alabaster buffalo
and the black-whiskered buffalo hunter
stood;
contemplating each other
across the blue distance
of a bottomless canyon.
A feather on an Indian spearhead
embedded in the great white taurine shoulder
fluttered,
and his small pink eyes
glowed
as he watched the man
in dirty skins.
The hunter rode a magnificent stallion
of Clydesdale proportions,
A Frank Frazetta
Beowulf
stud;
marked like an Appaloosa,
arching its long gray neck
in the thin air;
studly mist billowing
from its flared nostrils.
At the hunter's feet,
a black mongrel
part hound,
part wolf
crouched;
it's fur long ink strokes,
it's shoulders
rock hard,
like it was chiseled
out of hell's coal;
it's eyes like embers of fire.
The hunter came
with yet another companion;
a huge eagle hovered
like his feathered shadow,
his spirit guide;
talons thrust toward
that white hump
atop the crag.
Between those shaggy giants,
a stunted old pine tree hung,
growing out of the cracks
in the weathered
many-colored rocks.
The old tenacious tree dripped
sweet pine gum,
and its thick gnarled branches
reached out
to the snow bull
the buckskin man,
the majestic eagle;
hunter and prey,
both;
each to the other.
Purple blue-black mountains
loomed on the horizon,
like silent big-sinued sentinels
for a valley of monsters
and mystery.
The dying sun cast its last
fading shafts of light
onto the tiny patches of brown bark
still clinging to the swelled trunk
of the grizzled tree,
and on the yellow-black horns of the bull,
and on the barrol of the big Fifty
cradled in the strong arms of the hunter,
and on the pure whiteness
of the eagle's crown.
The white buffalo
raised its great head.
The hunter raised
the Sharps.
The dog growled,
from somewhere demons dwelled.
The eagle screamed,
unfurling its great wings,
ready to dive down.
Darkness fell,
and Death reached out
to all of them.
Lacing the chill of twilight,
cutting through the stillness
like a cold blade,
came the cry of a carcajou;
bestial, haunting, regal
and absolute,
from far off.
27 June 1978 Butch Buttkus
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