This One, This Poem

(People should share poetry, part 2)

I love words — and I love the spaces between them. I love too many poems to have a real favorite. And I don't remember exactly how or why or when I found this poem, but for a long time, a very long time, I have found myself in it. Defined by it, perhaps. . .

It's a prose poem, from Kate Daniels' The White Wave.

HUNDERTWASSER AND THE SIX-YEAR-OLDS

I love Hundertwasser because so many people think his paintings look like they're done by children. "Even my six-year-old Joey could've done that," they cry, pointing to the framed Hundertwasser print on my mantle, the one called The Miraculous Draft. I love Hundertwasser because his joyous paintings with their brilliant blue backgrounds and tiny, fishlike people make me feel I'm in kindergarten again, when I wasn't afraid to make the world any way I wanted it to be. I painted tree trunks orange and purple, and the faces of mothers red or light blue in distress. I drew people taller than mountains and birthday cakes as large as swimming pools. I had a long, flat carton of crayons that thrilled me with its invitation to change the world.
In the Hundertwasser I have, the eight large gold birds are as important as the people. Their eyes are wide open and looking steadily in all directions. Each of them has one hidden eye looking into the canvas, and one eye looking out. Six brown people in funny hats, tourists, I think, are sitting in a gaily painted boat that is passing in front of a town. In real life, these people would be too big for the boat. They would sink, and the world would have another tragedy: "Six Drowned on Vacation" the headlines would say. There would be coffins and the bloated bodies and weeping relatives taking tranquilizers in the funeral home. But in Hundertwasser's painting these six saved people glide along in their fancy boat waving and picking fish from the water and dangling their legs over the side in a lighthearted way. They're on vacation for all of us. They make us feel better about every person who ever drowned because deep in the water beneath their overcrowded boat lies a turquoise semicircle full of big-eyed fish. It might be something as common as fishing net, the way a six-year-old would draw it. On the other hand, it might be an underwater railroad, the place drowned people go, out of the dangerous currents and fear of depths, out of real life where people act their age and paint like photographs.
We all knew how the world could be when we were six and we unleashed our powers on our fingerpaints and crayon boxes. What we didn't know was how it really was. So this is a poem for all the six-year-olds in Hundertwasser, the brave ones in the blue world who grew up and also refused to grow up, who are six and six hundred, who saw it all with one eye and painted it with the other.

mmmmhmmmmm. . . . .