Doug Tanoury

A Cubist's Still Life

The sky was perfectly azure today,
With no more than few faint wisps
Of cirrus and stratus clouds
Feathering lightly across high altitudes
Above the Southern horizon.
This clear autumn day
That to me is like one of Picasso's blue paintings.
These are the days of dim indigo,
Where dusk never fully darkens to night,
And dawn never really advances towards day,
But is stunted and weak like the first light
That shines each morning through the Sycamores.

These are the days of suspended disbelief
Where I believe, what once I did not,
In a turned around consciousness that has slipped
Between darkness and light into
That limbo state
That is the mezzanine of being,
Where everything is lit in cerulean hues,
And whatever I do Is so much empty motion,
Mere mimesis,
A cubist's still life.

Sage With Umbrella Watches The Collapse Of The Modern Age

I remember
It was a perfect summer day
The kind that only seems to occur
In early September,
With a sky so azure
It seemed to glow with some
Inner luminescence
And the vivid color finish
They spray on new cars in Detroit,
The ice blue sports cars and
Peacock blue sedans.

A day so temperate that
The air feels perfect against the skin.
It is more an absence of temperature,
As if both hot and cold have somehow slipped
Below the point of perception and the air
Itself has become imperceptible.

Ah, such a day Of blue placid beauty.
And then the rains began.
In ways fitting for our age,
In abstract and surreal images,
In some post modernistic vision,
With glass and concrete towers
Intertwined with airplanes,
Add to that the obligatory apocalyptic
Flames and smoke and you have a work that
Dali would paint, a Warhol or a Max.
And the rain began.

It rained paper and desks,
Chairs and tables,
All the mundane debris
Of daily life.
And it rained people,
Arm flailing,
Legs kicking,
It rained fire,
It rained rock,
It rained dust.
And I find myself in a Peter Max
Oil on canvas, entitled:
"Sage With Umbrella
Watches The Collapse
Of The Modern Age"