A Mirror To The World

A Painting Of Five Horses 

by A.M. Stockhill

There was shuffling and thudding

of hooves, like horses do, when they’re

on the verge of going somewhere.

There’s often some indecision,

but eventually, they make their way.

They know wild.

Some evenings they talk about ghostly winds, 

air of different colors, the flavors of clouds, 

and other puzzling phenomena.

It’s the stuff of Scientific American

and Harper’s that decorates their canvas.

Their heads rose high when they heard

Vaughn Monroe’s version of 

Ghost Riders in the Sky.

A couple of them snorted; 

the others shook their heads; 

they kicked up some dirt

and shifted their bodies.

They think the Burl Ives version is better.

Today they have been pondering

the grassland’s question of whether 

they were of time or simply beyond belief.

There was some tail swishing and head bobbing;

their soft noses lifted to the fragrances 

of wet grasslands and their eyes to the 

astonishing monsoon sky.

They all nodded.

We are who we are and then some.

From: Dreams, Memories, &

Leaps Into The Wilderness

Unpub. MS p. 9

For more information about this artist:

https://amstockhill.com/about/

The Art Gallery

Belleza Gallery

Bisbee, Arizona

These are memories

of places I don’t remember having been,

but given the trickery of memories,

maybe I was in those places

in a fanciful leap

into a place beyond place,

into a time beyond time.

The paintings 

that make my heart ache 

call forth homes and peaceful places,

of what could have been,

of what should have been.

There is a kind of aloneness

that comes with seeing,

like meditation when the mind 

lets loose itself and the world.

Those places lie within me

untouched by experiences, 

emerging pristine

from the heart of the painting, 

beyond what can be said,

beyond what can be seen.

They are about things hidden in plain sight,

in the anxious purity of silence known,

as in a love affair of wordless intimacies.

From: A Preface To The Universe:

Women, Getting Older, and

Other Mysteries

Unpub. MS p. 6

Silence

To some of us the world is blue with silence,

because silence is bright yellow, bright green,

and silence is wide and narrow,

full of prayers, full of good and evil.

And following along are the thunderous silences,

like empty sports stadiums, closed race tracks,

and shattering cruelties that surround us in red.

There are curiosities of silence, of the strong, silent type,

the quiet ones, those children who have been too quiet

for too long; the silence of the sulking, depressed, lonely,

contemplative, guilty, puzzler, wanderer, and lover.

There is the silence of love’s hidden work,

the burning silence of sunrise and sunset,

and when the music begins, silence deepens it.

For the troubled: outward silence; inward screams.

Make room for silence; live in the mercy of silence.

When you are in the noise of nature and you hear 

your footsteps and breathing, bow in that holy place.

Let silence be an art we practice.