Sacred Way to Le Mort Homme
The gulf could also be seen as the Columbia Breaks, a fortified line of waves containing such a rapid succession of jumpy mullets, one felt as if they were taking a German barrage at Verdun. Or the Good Hope, the low shrub and grasses draw one to the Southern Hemisphere. I'm still waiting for my white squall. Or my voie sacrée to Dead Man Hill.
Well, I have found my white squall and Sacred Way to Le Mort Homme; it was a maelstrom, with an un-Christian name. The drainage ditches should have seen fortification and terracing like the trenches of the troubled in France. Instead, both filled to the scuppers with liquid death.
The untried were denied. But upon the cumulus return to the aurora or eventide, clouds melt like ice. The pallet has been removed, swirling brushstrokes of white, grey behind tope, hot and cold returning to the atmospheric battlefield.
The minimalist rolls of sea carrying the schools of plastic water bottles and the peppercorn covered Sargasso fluitans. The thunder rumbles the liquid grains of wood.
And there are seagulls at crossfire.
But then in my beach chair...grey swording through the red cliffs of Sedona…and a minute later...the red cliffs of Sedona swording back through the grey, burning white outlines serve to distinguish the cloud from the blue.
About the Author
An English teacher in a former life, who started painting in 1976 and was first published in 1984, B. Elliott Crist was most recently witnessed as Emmitt Smith's dancing partner on Dancing with the Stars. His paintings and his poetry are of the Absurd Impressionist school.