A Letter

The south was my Japan.  The head a moveable house, like a tree with legs.  A palette of wheat and whiskey and peas.  Straw hat ploughed face.  I painted a chair.  It was a candle.  The phalanges of the Virgin in silhouette.  The blossoms signal the beginning of the end.  We are walking to the church.  We are going out to the edge of the property.  The cypress oscillates, flickers.  We are halfway there.  Yellow crackles like dry grass on the souls of your feet.  There is no color that does not see you.  The factory in the distance spews its white blossoms.  We are out for a walk in the paint of earth and sky.  It is a slow burn on the road to joy.  The nights are more radiant than day.  I painted a book.  A melancholy doctor keeps it on his desk.  From the windows of the asylum I see the orange dust of the fields.  The gleaners slump like marionettes in the barn.  I painted the wooden hands of the women.  The water in the stone basin is so clear and cold it cuts your wrists.