PAINTING THE HOUSE: for Lee Perron

PAINTING THE HOUSE
        —for Lee Perron

After dinner we walk in the strange July rain.
You say it's tornado weather
and the radio reports strange snow in the Sierras.
The Valley town of Winters was struck by its first tornado ever.

This bowl of landscape reminds me of Wyoming.
The Midwest, you say, and you couldn't be happier
tho you call yourself a Hoosier from the plains of Indiana
by way of Boston, stranded in a place called home, California.
What stirs in this alchemy of clouds
spread across the Healdsburg valley?

Cattle tear at the grass. Bullfrogs squeak like mice
as they dive for cover in the roadside ditch.
The cloud feathers funnel towards the east
and the sky burns like salmon eggs on pale gravel.

We return to paint the Victorian doors verneer and birch—
color names for variations of white paint.
Locked in thought, we quietly work,
our daydreams spread across freshly painted walls.
Soon, the house is flooded by the light.

7/82
added 10/16.


No first draft, this is the final, and only copy. Probably won't retype it. Just sayin'.

Lytton Sta. Rd., Healdsburg, CA. The oddest thing about Lee's old farmhouse was that the well went bad, they'd punched through the fresh water aquafer, to the saline/sulphur layer, so the water wasn't potable, but the free mineral baths were great. Turned my jewelry black.

The couple that own the property built a modern house of cinderblock, and had fresh water. We watched a lunar eclipse with them and Jeffrey Miller, of Black Sparrow Press in the mid 1990s—still looking for those paper files.