MY STILL LIFE WATERCOLOR

It’s a still life watercolor
Of a now-late afternoon
As the sun shines through the curtained lace
And shadows wash the room

Every time I walk out the front door I hear water falling.

Instead of running to find the source, I remember it’s a yard fountain. I’ve grown so accustomed to the sound that the silence left when it broke was deafening, like what is missing from my day.

Every other sound had room to annoy me when the fountain was down.

Paul Simon wrote and sang The Dangling Conversation, also The Sound of Silence, and without falling water that’s what I heard. And I didn’t like it.

If I stay in for the late afternoon shadow party on my walls, I’d miss the golden hour magic where everything within eyesight is more beautiful than any other part of the day.

Golden vision during the golden hour. From that moment forward, nothing will look as good for another twenty four hours. At least that’s the theory. And I don’t agree.

And we sit and drink our coffee
Couched in our indifference, like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar

The three lines of lyrics above are not a still life watercolor, it’s a moment to add to the pile of why to break up. I’m not a ‘couched in indifference’ kind of guy. It sounds like something you learn to say in therapy.

What sort or therapy, you ask? Probably the kind you need to stay in New York City, or Chicago, if you were born there and didn’t leave the first time you heard about the golden hour.

I mean, how much loveliness is there in cement shadows moving across cement in a vertical city? Where’s the light through delicate flower blossoms, the juxtaposed vision from foreground to background?

Leonardo DaVinci knew his golden hour when he painted Mona Lisa.

In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs
The borders of our lives

For all of his work Paul Simon has not won the Nobel Prize for Literature like Bob Dylan. If I had to choose between them, as in who to listen to for eternity, Paul’s got the gig, not Bob.

Still, the Nobel is something. Is this the song that put him over the top with voters?

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Here’s a little tip, Bob: Paint your masterpiece in the golden hour. It doesn’t have to be a watercolor, either.