Application to A Carton of Eggs.
The short is kind of boring, in my own opinion, but it was improv. The poem's saving grace is how short it is :D :D :D
Didn't you know about the sky?
There.
So you told me you had brought to life a work of art.
You had that quasi-insecure smile on your face
-as if you really need my confirmation!-
and sat back in expectation of my praise.
You were surprised when I wouldn't answer?
Tell me what you think, talk, please, talk
No I won't I won't I can't I refuse you.
That's us.
Our soliloquies overlapping, canceling each other out
like all good stormclouds should
(with lots of noise and lightning)
But I confess
-see, now you've got me, a confession!-
I confess.
You moved me to tears when you said the sky was nothing
but a hole in the earth.
Armageddon
You wake up this morning (it was almost afternoon; past eleven-thirty) and your teeth hurt, they ache as if you clenched your jaw all night. You wake up because both your parents walk into your room, demanding you get up and shooting off everything that already happened while you were still sleeping. Apparently, one of your family's cats pissed on a painting.
You struggle with the mental image of a cat pissing on a painting -are paintings not usually on the wall, far out of the reach of incontinent cats? -and get out of bed.
This painting: it's small, perhaps a square foot, a painting done a few hundred years ago by some Brit. It's very dark (how does one clean a painting? You don't know). On it are a horse and two dogs with a British landscape behind them. The animals are over in the left corner of the canvas, standing/sitting aside one another, keeping the composition reasonably interesting. The horse is very obviously recognizable, but the two dogs beside it have become mere shadows with pink tongues and white paint-dot eyes.
Have you ever studied a painting up close? (You asked me once.) From a distance a painting will generate an image for the onlooker, the big picture if you will. But if the onlooker steps closer and peers in at the work he or she can single out detail, minute and powerful and complete within itself. These bits of paint -oil gouache tempera acrylic whatever rocks your boat babe -clung to the canvas in globs or beads or popped bubbles, don't you want to touch them? (You asked me next.)
Did you know oil paint takes eighty-five years to dry? Did you know that if you apply your paint too heavily, eventually gravity will pull it off?
I've dreamt about this. I dreamt I made a painting and it was sold to the museum and one hundred years later the oil paint had dried and become too heavy. My conscious, dreaming brain paused as it wondered exactly how the paint would fall; would it peel and curl into little leaves and slowly float down, littering the floor underneath, a few scraps on the frame? Or would the gobs cling together, dried up forever? Would they drip off the painting like rivulets of some liquid (even though they are dry) to the museum floor?
What kind of sound would that make? A plunk? A plop? A pitter-patter?
Mm, you replied when I asked you, that sounds too much like water might. Paint is thicker than water or juice or coffee or blood. Paint is like liquid rubber, sticky and filling and chewy.
Then should it bounce? I asked.
You laughed. It could bounce, maybe. If you could get it into a ball-shape.
You show up at my doorstep with the painting, wrapped in a sheet, under your arm and tell me about your morning.
I make the pointless remark of saying it smells really bad even from under the sheet. Then I ask how the cat could get to the painting to pee on it in the first place. You tell me the painting was on the ground and leave it at that.
We unwrap the painting and you show me how the piss affected it. I am honest when I say I can't see anything different. You point out to me; the paint is seperating from the canvas in patches. I look closer, ignoring the smell, and it's true: the paint already dry (more than eighty-five years old, you see) it's cracking and, like in my dream, slightly curling. It looks like a minute landscape torn by an earthquake. The colors are all muddy: umber and burnt sepia and light cerulean in forest green in the hills behind the animals. The sky is even darker, like a storm coming up.
What a strange painting it is, I say, what could the painter have been thinking?
You run a short-nailed finger across one side of it, feeling the dips and lifts in the paint. As the style was when it was painted, it is finely painted, no great beads or puddles of dry paint on it.
You catch your nail under a peeling piece, and tug. The paint rips, coming off in an uneven patch the way dry old plastic might rip, and underneath the imprimatura is the canvas.
It is stained a violent orange. The color of the imprimatura had two hundred years to seep in, after all.
We can see the texture of the canvas, some dark smudges sculpting the orange into a strange cloud.
From a distance we look at it, the horse and the dogs (their gleaming paint-dot eyes are still bright!) on the hills with the relatively bright orange canvas peeking through in the sky, like a toxic cloud with the sun glowing behind it.
The dogs and the horse who saw Armageddon arrive, in the eighteenth century, on a hill in Schotland, you say blandly, and I laugh.
That's what it looks like.
Two hundred years later we've given the painter a good story, I agree.
Are you going to restore it? I ask you. I figure you'd be able to.
No, you reply, I like it better this way.
Well, can you get rid of the smell? I ask, and you laugh.
No. It'll have to dry up over time.
>
A quick remark about all this: I may be an art student but to be honest I have never encountered piss on two-hundred year oil paintings before so in truth I don't know what would happen to the paint. Use your imagination.
