Water Color

Sky-blue, haze-blue, sea-blue. Tom worked while Preston meditated upstairs. They both had been up late. Now he sat where he had lain all night and looked out the window thru Monterey Pines. Sunday, a winter morning far from home. Green pines, brown trunk, red trunk. He had felt this way before, after an unexpected debauch. Childhood, passive; adolescence, reactive, he thought; and now a man who realized the limitations of home and habit. “I move to keep things whole.” This was the wholeness of fresh perception. Orange sky, yellow haze, there’s a shadow and it is blue. On wet paper— his long, smooth, cold brush.

14 December 1980