Boundless

Boundless

They’re saying
there are no boundaries
between you and the stars.
between you and the mouse
scratching in your bookshelf
making a nest between Grimm’s fairy tales
and the Oxford companion to English Literature

No boundaries separating you
from your bed and your
tangled bedding
even your pillow where you
bury your head,
filled with tangles of dreams
drifting
from the dust under your bed
to the tall grasses
outside your door
to those twisting trees
of the African plains
and the math formulas
you shrugged off as unfathomable
now knowing that X equals a
feathery white bird with a bright
red chest matching the shawl
you wore when you lived in Guatamala
three centuries ago.
swimming lightly over ocean waves
as the white airy curtains
waft out side the window frame
of your wooden house
that you never lived in
but nevertheless
there they are
in that same unknown house
filling rooms with themselves
your two dead sons
talking and possibly
singing to someone
not directly to you
but to someone
you are connected to
and you know the song
because some tribal Indians
sang it to you yesterday
as you inhaled the
curling starry sky
that Van Gogh
connected you to

no beginnings and no end
just us
spinning
from rivers
and lakes
and seas
and forests, drifting
and we are the leaves
flying away with winds
taking us to the past,
the present
and the future
which we all know
is all one.
Just us
the living
and the dead
and everything else
bound and
boundless.

©Helen Webber/2008

Fine Art & Bupkas

Fine Art & Bupkas*

FINE / NON FINE / UNFINE
ART
REFINED ART
FOUND ART
FOOLISH ART
MADE BY SOMETIMES
GIDDY
OVERBEARING
BEARS WHO THINK THEY ARE ARTISTS

( all artists need
finger thumb opposition
which bears have
to enable them to open garbage cans
and break into houses
for food)

Artists of all kinds will
sometimes do anything
for food.
Even the finest of the fine artists.

Some will place a stick on a wall
or wrap their garbage with string
to please a caustic curator
who is also scrounging for food
and call it art with a capital A

Unfine artists wander around contemporary museums
and realize with despair that they
have not really grasped the
currents of the current art
and they return to their studios
which they cannot actually afford
and wonder
if they are really artists
at all.

They fall
heavily into their beds
and go back to sleep
with stuffed heads
of emerging
submerging
and re emerging art
waking with renewed energy
they paint enlarged
painterly
apples with cheese
and sell it
to a food magazine...

for bupkas.

©Helen Webber/2008


* definition of "bupkas": Yiddish word meaning nothing. literally goat droppings.