WHITE PORCHES
 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 old 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.

*     *     *     *

     The 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 the old drawing table.  I bought it from another artist while I was in college, nineteen, and working fulltime as a paste-up artist at a printing company.  What was his name?  Tom, I think.  He and his wife were recent graduates of Ringling School of Art in Florida and had moved back to the mountains in north Georgia.  They always needed money, so he offered his old drawing table to me.  When you’ve never owned a drawing table, an old one covered with scraps of yellowed masking tape is a beacon of beauty, as that one was to me twenty-seven years ago, and I had to have it.
     I wonder what he would think if he knew I still use it?  No way to tell.  He left the printing company shortly after that 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.  Like it did when I left the Georgia mountains after college for the gauzy shores of South Carolina to learn I never liked sand and water.  Or when I traveled to the taupe-drenched desert of Utah years later to discover I crave deeper shades of green.
     I am a child of lush flora, verdant land that swells 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 trying to capture the essence of these porches all summer in a series of abstract paintings for my gallery in San Francisco.  The director envisions a solo exhibition at the end of the year.  We will call it White Porches, he 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 in the middle of the painting with a small, tapered brush.

Thursday afternoon,
and I find my youngest 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.  Always thick and rich—a singular passion for painters.  The fragrance of oil is intoxicating, but I often work in acrylic for safety and the allure of a speedy drying time.  Though nothing 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 that inspires 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 canvas, yet never allowed to land.  So different from the side to side, sweeping movement required for painting with a soft sable brush on watercolor paper.  A different language from a different world.  Watercolor is another pleasure, but one I seldom indulge, 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, made taller 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 mahogany leaves of another evening, the glittered trees lisping their simple liturgy.
 

THE END

(first appeared in Fullosia Press)

Laura Stamps
P.O. Box 212534
Columbia, SC 29221-2534
laurastamps@mindspring.com
Copy right 2003
All rights belong to the author. For re-print permission email the author above.