THE MEADOWS, HATFIELD, acrylic on canvas, 20×16
THE LANDSCAPE is always the same, and ever-changing:
season to season, hour by hour, day to day; inch by yard by mile.
Dawn turns green turns red turns green.
Mallards rise from misty puddles that shrink or grow with rain.
Mouseprints weave daily hieroglyphs crumbling in the sand.
Curly, half-chewed leaf falls silently, leisurely, diagonally intersects a floating milkweed seed
along the tractor-rutted road leading to the river and potato fields.
Toad, grasshopper, and darning dragonfly invisible in plain sight; shrieking of a hawk.
Pink clover on lush green lures butterflies, wasps, and bumblebees, dawn to dusk.
Tree limb whispers in the starry breeze, groaning when it gusts.
Rime crystalizes shards of grass overnight, melts by nine (later, if in shade).
Blue and gold spark sunlit snow until rosy clouds scud by.
Within my shifting tides and endless motion,
thinking about the beach or what has to be done
or biting into a crisp apple,
sometimes I don’t pay any attention at all.
Rather than the fiction of a single moment, I paint
what remains visible to everyone that I still call my own.
