Preface

a poem, April 2001

In August of my fifty-fourth year, leaving my last wife, I moved out to a quite peculiar place a friend had found for me to rent – a kind of modern day shack to tell it candidly, though plenty roomy for a bachelor life – at an old ex-horse farm no longer working, on an elevation of the ground called "Spirit Hill", a steep round haymeadow hilltop where a range of small size forest mountains hold up the skyline all around, at a dirt road's end, amid several hundred acres of these well-loved wild New England woods. Of course fine little creeks wind and tumble down the bony creases of this land. And my new place had – and still has now – several small rooms, one of them with lovely morning light, and in that room I soon propped up a soft pine board left over from some simple furniture just built, and picked out the old art brushes again from their tool box after leaving them aside for twenty years. (To tell it candidly, I'd made a sign or two and such as that from time to time, so had the proper kind of paint on hand as well, though in few colors.) I painted me a picture for a space of wall. I must. Who else would paint the picture that was wanted in that place? It was a magic morning picture of the Sun. It turned out pretty goddam good, to my surprise and even shock. (That's speaking candidly.) Now – eight months on and eighty-seven pictures later – much has changed for me. The walls are full for sure with only space remaining in the attic. But my interior space has blown out to the furthest reaches of the stars beyond all walls, and I have reached down to the deepest waters of the soul, and found myself alive in all the realms of myth.