Langley - Raking Light

You lovely looker on and by and by and. One-eyed Cupid, locked, cocks, and shot Zenos arrow at Zeuxis grapes. Shaft straight. The pointed parabola arced its homeward hoops on its wondering way through loop and loop towards my eyes apple; its projectory now arches down to heel to hit or miss, may kiss the head or glance off on bow bend or twisted thread. My flighted hope: that bird cracks glass, and tumblers beakers break on painted grapes on picture plane or bounce back deflected, as mote on float reflected. Map the rebound cause I am sore astound and all amazed, while flecks dart and seeds quiver quiver while the heavy freighted interim divides by half by half by half.

Split hairs or ends or seconds now sub-divide by half and half, as hares breath on tortoises collar falls and arrow tip elbows each atom aside to side or sneaks contracted kiss, a peak, a contact passing charge in the charge in the change from Z to thee kinetic.

Keep lovely looking on and over looking keep looking till your lead tip punctures what, back then, was walnut, poppy, hemp, pine and olive; then a resinous gloss, of Paris Green, of arsenic, of mercuric sulphide; then, later, oglio cotto, honeyed lead oxide; then beeswax; now, bladder-pod, ironweed, calendula, sandmat, in slow drying strata of alpha-linolenic, brittle as it brakes, of crisp linoleic, of still wet oleic acid, still wet. Then warp canvas warped. Then wall. So keep on lovely looking on, no overlook, from then to now, as now the paste-board splits and peck hits home and dry eye and true to touch and each grape breaks and tortoise tumbles down hap with hare and tip touches now, and now, and when and then just so, soothed through freeze frame and bending glass, each hot pigment shot and then and then, keep lovely looking till.

Don Jos, at dawn at pinked half-light, lit by blooms of orpiment lowlight, hit in a masticot morning stands in reddish strands of saffron shade, all tinged to the touch-up among this ante meridiem pigment play, this play of Oker de Luce, of cochineal, of all of all those softish greenish vegetals, of yellowed mineral bloom a vegetable lake of alum, salt and ashy alkali and all-for-all of the sharp smack tang of spiced metallic oxide, of acumen and acid: first, he dimly thinks, Ill lay on soft,my whitest lead; then, he thinks, Ill cut in cutewith lac of carmine red; de Luce, he thinks, for all her loose hair, more light and bright, golden in the shadow of her chin, he thinks, the rucks of her creamy white blouse;and full inch-thick, full de Rouse, he thinks, for her lips Don Jos, woken, winking, blinked-out, out in the sunsight air of pinke-yellow, dazed in quite the electric scatter, quite the warmish Rayleigh, quite the Mei, really pinked in the Galician umber air, just a crumpled hardish thing, just past prime.

Don Jos, at dawn at pinked half-light, lit by blooms of orpiment lowlight, hit in a masticot morning stands in reddish strands of saffron shade, all tinged to the touch-up among this ante meridiem pigment play, this play of Oker de Luce, of cochineal, of all of all those softish greenish vegetals, of yellowed mineral bloom a vegetable lake of alum, salt and ashy alkali and all-for-all of the sharp smack tang of spiced metallic oxide, of acumen and acid: first, he dimly thinks, Ill lay on soft,my whitest lead; then, he thinks, Ill cut in cutewith lac of carmine red; de Luce, he thinks, for all her loose hair, more light and bright, golden in the shadow of her chin, he thinks, the rucks of her creamy white blouse;and full inch-thick, full de Rouse, he thinks, for her lips Don Jos, woken, winking, blinked-out, out in the sunsight air of pinke-yellow, dazed in quite the electric scatter, quite the warmish Rayleigh, quite the Mei, really pinked in the Galician umber air, just a crumpled hardish thing, just past prime.

See, how the blend-line, the blur-line of his thin nightcoat scumbles off in the ozone; how it offs opaque in the envious streaks of civil twilight, as the dawns drive hints in demi-tints, saddens his grosser edges her tits are rosy in the dawn, he dimly thinks how, it dissolves his quiet breath in tender air, his body, his not yet solid extension: and yet, hes not quite empty either, as that would be pure space

And with half of half his hottish mind still up in bed, still on Mara, on Jills mouth, and still on rock doves, croodling, croodling, the sluggish el palomero half or hardly hears the pink-pink of fluttering spink or twink, of a short sharp finch, its courting call, its fine green shout-out to a lost flock, from out there on the green beans, out beyond the sill, from the senna bush, calling, calling; or the grunt, the coo, and fall of a choir-school booby, whos lost his mate; or a proud wood pigeon, sat on the indigo gate. Stopped on empty, in a moments space he hardly hears the liquid notes jug jug the fast, the thick, the full-throated glottals god! o god! that shoot the plum-tree leaves, that lace the wriggling whitethorn, that seed small explosions, rattles in the pomegranate tree arise, he thinks, my love, my dove, my fair, and comeaway, he thinks, in times of singing and hardly then he hardly hears away, away ignition-spark among our apples pips: it is our lips again a fathers tale distracts him Instead, he almost hears in the pink-pink or piz piz perhaps a longer longer echo of his childs first words, when he called for lapiz, Lpez, pencil-leads, and the father, flinches. Don Jos Ruiz y Blasco, the pigeon fancier, painter of pipion, new master at the Bellas Artes, comes down across an orange flared kitchen, to find Pablo, his Pablito, hard to his work: look how hes lost in the arsenic sulfide glare, he thinks, in orpiment, lost; lost in masticot,lost to the saffron, to the English Pink, he thinks. Look how my raw Jack kids and pluckshis nib, sees and sets and robs and stealseach squab in more bright and brighter light and glibly gets and gets all these real thesereally real pigeons The shock that shook that hit me then: the hammered in-homing. My guileless goblin pink, you have mummed me quite, exposed my cheat, revealed a likely scam: five pigeons not quite tight to an ochre ground. Your fledgling barbels, scrawled and drawled across my careful crappers, your unfledged gall-free jacobines just so jogged and jotted off, in freefall, have jostled off my cheaply cautious chirpers, jumped my just-so crafted pickers, and are the thing per se, perhaps; and Im bastard back, blackjacked.

I know Ive nothing on this crafty kidder; plucked quite naked, my care mere clay, so: here, come have them then, all these,my best brushes, my palette, gesso and linseed. How hard things are as he strokes them, his thumbs up across their throbbing vanes, having his feel for the yellow fur, the white flesh, the spiky wings and big head, ruffling down the rachis, soft to the full to the filoplume, neat to the barbs, which I feel, feel sharply, keenly, ever so precise. While I pick poses on the pink, his birds expose rainbows, of all colours, and fill the freighted air