WITH EVERY STEP WE ARRIVE SOMEWHERE

I dreamed of how the stones beneath us moved as we sat watching the sea.
What was important? The stones, us, our sitting, our watching, or the sea?
The dream, the thought? Or none of it? It just was, and that was it?
This morning I fed and watered the hens and pigs, and for a while
sat on a chair in the pig pen as they ate and drank, rooted about.
Then they lay down in the shade and I went on sitting in the sun.
What was important? The hens, the pigs, me sitting, the chair itself?
(It’s green, if you need to know. A gift a neighbour was throwing out.
It’s a good chair. Comfortable enough to sit in and watch pigs or just
to think in for a thousand years, two thousand, ignoring the phone.)
Meanwhile, you were busy blackberrying in your jeans and purple shirt.
And the straw hat you’ve had since before I knew you. Sometimes
you broke off from blackberrying to photograph a butterfly or moth.
Eventually, for lunch, we ate tomatoes with cucumber and a little bread,
over which we talked and I read a poem by Frank O’Hara that shocked me.
It was in the book Contemporary American Poetry, a 1962 paperback that
I hadn’t looked at in many years but had been enjoying once again.
O’Hara’s poem shocked me because I had recently completed a painting
of a man drowning, and towards the end had taken out the man’s face,
but still called it (in my head at least) Man Drowning. And I didn’t know
that in doing so I might have recalled O’Hara’s poem Why I Am Not A Painter,
which is about how his friend painted a picture with sardines in it,
then took them out and still called the painting Sardines. And O’Hara,
maybe because of this wrote twelve poems called Oranges without
mentioning oranges, or orange. Unsettling. And perhaps it’s not been
much of a day so far, except for you blackberrying and me
sitting with the pigs. Here’s the painting anyhow. It’s what it is, as they say.
I still call it Man Drowning but you don’t have to call it anything.
Maybe you’ll see something in it. Maybe you’ll just see paint. Anyway…