A Smile Of Gold Can Stay
On tomorrow this painting will turn 50. It has been with me as ‘gift’ in all the houses I have lived in: on pale sky rec-room walls, on orange hallways up the stairs, and in sea green rooms with a rained-down view, this ‘painting’ has hung in silence speaking with voices of the mind. Each turn to scan its craft found me paused to gather-in all the friendship words stippled in each hue. And it was during each of these visits to this our gallery that I met up with this wonder: how that, Kathy, the younger, with prescient loveliness aside, could even think to portray two artists in one painting as ‘Bird After Rain’. This special, special kinship, penned by two, using a new language from an ‘undiscovered country’, has now toured for a half century.
Few gifts have attained such heights, few silent expressions have afforded so much inspiration or exemplified so much teamwork as our gift to each other. While I, the young writer, scrawled-on about the vibrant ‘life’ I wanted from ‘clean air’, she, the younger painter, chirped her clear artistic godliness from a trembling, colorful hand.
Tomorrow the painting must turn onto 50, even as I must turn toward 80, but Kathy ‘on every tomorrow’ will still be ageless, brushed in memories of silver among my warmths untold.
Happy birthday to us, Kathy Suthard. As often as I have looked on our work, I have always reserved for you—and for me—a smile of gold.
Give me one gift:
Yourself
Wrapped in the bows
Of the rainbow
Cleaned and showered
Like air after rain.
Give me one gift:
Tenderness
Wrapped in the neat
Package of carefulness,
And a natural flush
Of Indian red
Inside.
Give me one gift:
A thought
Wrapped in serious forevers,
A bundle of patiences--
The real you
Coming at me through
A nascent scene
Cleaned and showered
Like air after rain.