With hands like silk ...

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Walking west-south-west in dense fog

white as a congregation of ghosts rising

from an out-of-town graveyard

I reach for an imaginary easel

and close, woven cloth of hemp

with a palette of colors and knife.

It's summer on our Range and

I slosh a neutral green background

to roll back these five o'clock mists,

morning-led, scrolling in from valleys, 

muffling a lone kookaburra's chortle,

songs of magpie-larks, dry calls of crows.

As I stroll, I see evocations leap out -

sweeps of seascapes, mountains

and undulating woodlands.

I'd paint the over-arching sky

in a rush of violent purple, then

with a swish, wash it blue calm.

Black bitumen and ochre walkways

unwind before me. Dogs bark at

phantoms and phantoms shout Hi! 

My bobbing head lies in clouds

as they float down from hills

and I paint portraits as I progress

of sober members from the district choir,

friends from the village, cats

which I detest (they kill birds), family horses ...

my wife in her garden doing her coloring -

weeding, watering, pruning native Callistemon,

orchids with kind faces, day-lilies, agapanthus.

My brush no longer responds to real-life action.

It's as useless as a toothpick in a quarry.

Winds rise, fogs lift, tree by tree.

I look down steep gullies to see a truth.

My artistry's a fiction,

dreams, mere wishful thinking.

I'm stunned by the chasm of what is, what was.

These lines dare not recall 

how grand those visions were ...

With hands like silk, I hang them,

both portaits and landscapes,

in elusive studios deep inside my head.

I should be grateful for a clear day tomorrow

where my world's circle paints its own canvas

and I, there but to admire, with silken gloves off.