Room With A View

Image borrowed from Bing

Room With A View

Beneath the plaster old newspapers were stuffed
between half-petrified framing boards, Barbados
for roaches and rodents--a comics section with
Ally Oop peeking out, a bold headline that stated
President Eisenhower would put up an American
satellite to compete with Sputnik, a movie page
with a third of a QUO VADIS ad visible,

three thimble-sized metal toy cars pig-piled near a
cross beam, and a vacant bee nest three feet across,
its translucent honey combs empty and thin as
waxed paper,

walls that were once pea green back in the 40’s
when Bobby had the room, decorated with drawings
of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Hopalong Cassidy,
which gave way on one section to great billowing breasts,

then sometime in the mid-50’s the walls became daisy
yellow when Lucy inhabited the space, to match her throw
pillows, handbag, handmade quilt, a silken swath under
her jewelry box, and her swimming suit,

becoming jet black when Jedd rebelled in the late 60’s,
painting it coal bin black with silver spider webs,
peace signs, rainbows and raised fists along
the shoulders of every wall,

morphing into pale pink as Suzie matured in the 70’s,
complimenting her pink fingernail polish, pajamas,
feather boa, and leather boots, all pink, mantled
by pop star posters that would leave hundreds of
tack holes, little love craters that one could trace
the pigment history within,

and now everything is plastered over, sanded smooth,
and wearing a suit of purest white on sashes, door
and window frames, and base boards, transformed
into pristine antiseptic virginal white, where geometry
is abandoned, edges blend, pushing out all ancient
perspective-- becoming angel white, dove wings,
a spiritual portal, a walk through for specters,
a healing room--creating kundalini light from pigment;
a space to dream, to meditate, to write,
to ascend.


Glenn Buttkus

August 2011

Listed as #40 over on Magpie Tales 78

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