Anodyne
Monday, July 10, 2006
 

Philip Guston, Sleeping, 1977

Up at dawn, the ropes attached to the painters' movable scaffold struck against the balcony railing by the wind, tonk, tonk, tonk. An aeolian clock! Deep grey clouds, green treetops thrashing below. Rain overnight, still beaded on the Subaru's dirty hood. Little deltas in the windshield dust. I look like the car these days, like Guston's sleeper, with his scrambled hair and speckled ankles. Hair sprouting in places it never sprouted before: ears, neck, the joints behind my knuckles. Some grey now in the bushy patches of hair above my ears and the sideburns, silver threaded through chocolate brown. Heat makes my hair grow like the wisteria on the balcony. Twenty minutes with a razor every morning, yet by three o'clock I walk back to the bathroom to fill up my nalgene bottle and find myself gazing at a figure who looks like a cousin of Guston's Nixon, black stubble sprouting everywhere from roughly cratered flesh.
- posted by cjb @ 9:14 AM


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