A Courtyard Of Vigilant Repose Poem by Denis Mair

(for an image by Abdelhaq Djellab)
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Leonardo once began a voyage of daydreaming by gazing at spots on a weathered wall. Now another painter invites the weathering to converge and condense, letting it become a non-repeating texture, a non-pattern that is nonetheless a pattern, a background that could usurp the subject matter at any moment, inverting the host-guest relation and filling a courtyard or barnyard with dreams. The fowl luxuriates in its plumage, turning a morning of foraging into an occasion for self display. The head turns halfway about as if to check on something. Is the other fowl watching from nearby? Is the owner within sight? Their quiet nearness is a reassuring signal of safety, or an early warning system to expand the fowl's circle of vigilance. The fowl's ancestor bartered its use of wings to have this nearness, because it prefers a life of studious attention to grubs in soil. Every life has bartered away something; every living thing moves among dreams but must leave them in the background. For every life there is a teardrop over its bartered loss and gain. Every tear is a long-incubated moment of poignancy, like a seed that holds a whole predicament distilled into one drop, in which the involuted refection of a life is captured, and its growth-intent is suspended in a formal embryonic shape.