Drawings Inspired by Doug's Poem

These drawings are inspired by a poem.   

The poem is included at the bottom of the drawings.

                                                                                                                        5/7/12

Today’s News:  Spurned God Found Sipping Cappucino in Paris Café

Spider silk elaborates a latticework

in the corner of the waiting room.

While my car is under scrutiny,

I watch the sunlight animate strands into silent singing.

The waiting brings this incidental

monument

                        (to loving industry)

forward

and makes me wonder what else

I must have overlooked;

What other ordinary wonders am I missing

in my hurried and harried motions?

Just then, on the radio,

I listen to a pastor describe her loss of belief.

The host asks if she misses God,

as if God were a lover

who had grown bored and moved to Paris.

The question seems to forget,

to disregard all of nature

in its own right,

and so I ask the disembodied radio

as I entrench into my solitude,

Isn’t the presence of the startling and vast universe, that is,

isn’t the presence of nature itself enough?

Can we all just get along with that (and stop calling it God)? 

Can’t we disentangle the human situation

and then also free God from our festering wounds and tedious desires?

For my part,

I pour my longing and implacable world-pain into

the dingy corner of this shop

and find my emotions cohere to fashion an invisible bow

that plays inaudible music in an equally neglected corner. 

I look up to see if others can hear it, and find myself

smiling like a lonely fool, also happily forgotten.

I couldn’t find the spider there,

anywhere

but admittedly didn’t look very hard.

Maybe the spider was already dead,

having left his lures behind,

as if forsaken as an exiled god,

bereft of love but leaving signs of having loved,

off sipping coffee somewhere in France.                                   By Douglas Newton