White Porches

A poem by Laura Stamps

In a time of dragonflies and whippoorwills,
when marigolds thrive beneath the sun's
relentless smile, and doves dribble waterfalls
of song from the shingles, I remember the
moment the silken seams of my world burst.

It was mid-afternoon in the office. The
aging drawing table I use as a desk was
bathed in limpid light from a Tiffany lamp
almost as old. I had been working through
a mound of papers, when a thought sizzled
my mind, dizzying in its appearance, like a
seed leaping from a gerbera daisy's withered
womb. The long minutes curling their slender
fingers around a late summer day had parted
for an instant, offering this startled thought:

Spirit.

Not a new thought, yet the revelation of what
it would mean to live a life of Spirit trembled
me that day. Later, after work, I slipped into
bed with three sleepy cats, black and sweet
as Italian olives. There the same thought
feathered my body, shockingly, like the sudden
rush of angel wings, shuddered and white-hot:

Spirit.

Third week of August, and the sun
sets in the midlands of South Carolina
to the roar of crows, rolling its bright
bone into the lavender arms of twilight,
while palmettos, pines, and magnolias
sigh, shaking the night with their
tropical tambourines. How odd this
should happen at my drawing table.
I bought it from another artist when
I was nineteen, working days in the
paste-up department at a printing
company and attending college at
night. What was his name? Jack,
I think. He and his wife, both recent
graduates of Ringling School of Art in
Sarasota, had moved to the mountains
of north Georgia. Always in need of
money, he offered his drawing table
to me. When you've never owned
a drawing table, even an old one,
shellacked with scraps of yellowed
masking tape, shines like a beacon
of beauty, in the same way that one
winked at me twenty-seven years
ago, and I had to have it. I wonder
what he would say if he knew I still
use it? No way to tell. Six months
later he left the printing company
and disappeared like the flutter of
a gypsy moth on a moist June night.
I never met his wife, but I heard she
broke her toe one day tripping over
a chair in their apartment. The next
week, she ran into something else and
broke another, a woman who whirled
through life too fast for fragile toes.

If I were to live each day as a Spirit, filmy
and light-struck, rather than grounded in
a body, every aspect of my life would
change, as it did when I left the Georgia
mountains after college for the gauzy shores
of South Carolina to learn I am no fan of
sand and water. Or when I traveled to the
taupe-drenched deserts of Utah years later
to discover I crave deeper shades of green.
I'm a child of lush flora, verdant land swelling
in high places, and my name is Mirabella.

The latticed porches in my neighborhood gleam
through afternoon haze like white candles on
a wedding cake, waxy and upright, tiny arrows
pointing to the union between heaven and
earth. I have been capturing the essence of
these porches all summer in a series of abstract
paintings for my gallery in Atlanta. The director
envisions a solo exhibition at the end of the
year. "We will call it White Porches," she said.

White as summer leaf-shine or the light of Spirit.

Each painting is a collision of color and form
on large, wrapped canvases. Sometimes I add
modeling paste to convey texture. Other times
I scribble short poems about my cats directly
on the painting with a small, tapered brush:

Thursday afternoon, and
I find my adventurous cat,
the one nursing a three-
day cold, settled in the sink
among the dirty dishes,
toasting her shivered body
in the sun as if she were
basking on a warm porch.

Paint rolls from the brush or palette
knife onto the canvas like cake frosting,
thick and rich, a tactile passion for
painters. Although the fragrance of oil
always beckons, I usually work in acrylic
for safety and the allure of a speedy
drying time. Yet no scent can replace
the sensory joy of linseed oil, the way it
swirls through my head when I enter the
studio each morning, an earthy fragrance
inspiring me to strive for greatness in
the realm of color and composition. Not
to mention the magical way the hand
must move, up and down, when painting
with a stiff brush on stretched canvas,
as if the wrist were a butterfly flitting
back and forth, hovering inches from
the surface, yet never allowed to land.
So different from the side to side,
sweeping movement required for painting
with a sable brush on watercolor paper,
a different language from a different
world. Watercolor provides its own
pleasures, but one I seldom enjoy, addicted
as I am to the rhythmic motion essential
for pressing thick paint to gessoed linen.

Sometimes when I close my eyes I can see
myself living beyond my body, walking this
earth as a Spirit, magnified by the light, so
bright, emanating from me, as it attracts
whatever I desire. At that moment I realize
I am rich. This is the jeweled path I see, but
only when I close my eyes, as if I were my
youngest cat rolled in a ball on the quilt with
his paws wrapped around his face, dreaming.
And so I struggle to remove the stones from
my waking eyes, as crows swim over the
house, shuffling the onyx leaves of evening,
the glittered trees lisping their simple liturgy.

from The Cat Lady: A Novel in Verse, Artemesia Publishing, 2006

Copyright 2006 by Laura Stamps