I sat in front of you yesterday, wondering what you might make of all these piercing eyes, dumbfounded gazes, and exhibitionist sighs. I waited in turmoil, my head spinning in the energetic rapture of that place, and slowly, willfully, entered your world, the return of grace, as autumn might reclaim the land from the violence of summer storms. The bombardment of Gainsborough, Titian, Constable and Turner, bellowing in my mind.
As i sat before you once again, like some penniless and penitent supplicant before his master, i cast my mind back to the open field beyond the cloistered halls, and the simple room on the second floor, the hidden sanctuary, in our hallowed St Remy. The golden wheat flowing in the warm airs of an early autumn day, the birds, hidden in the cypresses, thrilling with the joyful youth of life's first summer, safe now from the excesses of that untempered heat, the fire in the luminescent sky, that burnt the swollen head, red. The cool blue clouds shielding all in a shroud of penance, free from those foreboding skies and Arlesque cries, banished, but for a moment, as the paint dried in the wind; The wind, that called my name, an offering of calm before the beckoning swirling harm might start again.
The reaping would soon occur, and in this thought, i found a silent ease, a moment of timeless peace, awash in the quiescence of that place, the fountain in the courtyard of my heart.
Until at last, the footsteps faded with the echoing dash of the garrulous crowd, and i was lost again in bliss. Lost, in a field of gold and blue. Baptized in a gentle rain, awash in a salty residue, the company of risen hearts. A flood of calm from out the din, infused within this retinue. The late summer sun, smiling gently, in this golden remembrance of you.
© Richard Michael Parker 2011
