Thoughts On Happiness

Painting by Kirby Sattler

"Love is the condition in which happiness of another
person is essential to your own."--Robert Heinlein.


Thoughts On Happiness


My grandfather used to say,
“Happiness is just those brief moments
in life when you’re not in pain.”

I loved my Pop, but
I must report he was a
hypocrite about happiness.

There was never a man
who loved life more,
or who could embrace calamity
with more grace.

When he was a toddler, playing
by the creek near their cabin,
watching his mother use a washboard,
he smelled death behind him;

turning he faced the hungry yellow eyes
of a cougar, growling with glee,
but before he could be devoured
his mother leaped over him,
pummeling the puma with her bucket--
he always hated cats after that.

He was an artist,
a Western landscape painter;
a master of clouds, mysterious valleys,
jagged peaks, and solitary protagonists.

As he aged, he struggled
with arthritis in order to hold his brushes.
I once told him, “You are an artist for the ages.
Never give up on your art, just paint your pain,
create color with your last breath”—
and he did, but pain emerged on the canvas
as beauty, as genius, as metaphor.

He stroked his joy into his oils, daubing it
onto dew bubbles, the gnarled dwarf trunks
of sagebrush, sunlight on a fencepost, moss
on a rock, the detail of bark on every tree,
the glint off Winchesters, smudges on leather
chaps, the rusty twists of barb wire, the big
veins on the hands of riders, farmers, and
mountain men.

Earl Melbourne Carpenter left us in 1986,
leaving his paintings hanging silently
in quiet rooms across five states;
but I still hear his Zorba laugh,
at midnight twice a week,
when he visits me. I can always
smell the rose oil in his hair
as I follow him back
into my dreams.

Glenn Buttkus

March 2010

Posted as part of the 1 year anniversary of dVerse Poets


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