A Spun Gray Chrysalis "Contemporary poets leave me breathless," I say. "They start their stanzas filled with verve and then end with a then, and then begin again as if they'd had to stop to take a breath." Blue-eyed, face red from months of winter winds, his mustache bristling gray from years of thought, Jim cocks one eye and makes his face Picasso-cubed. "Contemporary poets mock my eyes," he says. "and try to make me see design when all I really see are squiggly spots." "There's something missing isn't there?" I ask. "Or am I just confused? I understand a poem that builds from line to line to line until it climaxes in a period. These poems that run and run toward some end confuse me, make me feel half-made, undone." Jim throat-laughs deep inside his barrel chest. "You think that you're confused!" he says. "My art was born when times were hard. The WPA told most of us to sculpt alive our times. We sculpted animals and painted breadlines, teased canvases into a fiddling hill-folk dance that splashed strong blues, green greens, and checkered skirts into the eyes of men and women hoping hope in spite of money worries, empty cupboards, fear. . . "And suddenly Braque's crazy cubist art confused the world we knew and skewed our eyes and thought into a twisting, unknown, crazy world. Picasso threw his talent at our skills and shook and shook perceptions born with breath. "I didn't understand the cubist's art. I worked beside young Gromme's detailed birds and wondered at the revolution birthed and turned to middle age before I'd heard a revolution had been started up. We WPA types filled the parks with animals and jeered our fear at critics smart enough to know that some mysterious tide had turned and turned the artist's world wild-upside-down." The eyes and wind-stained face stare casually at me, intense, shrewd, calculating my response to thoughts dredged from a years-soaked, art-soaked brain. "You like Picasso now," I say. "How come? He opened up Pandora's box and swished aside the art world that you'd always known." He grinned. "Things change," he said. "Men change and grow; art changes, grows. Picasso ripped apart the world and puzzled it together once again. I took my animals and all their sinews, cells, and smoothed them out until they grew into the love, rage, hope, fear, hate, and joy I felt while stumbling through this world of ours." "You're saying art is troubling when it's new," I say. I pause. And then the revelation-flash: "You're saying newness makes art, art," I say. "Old disciplines still have their purposes," he says. "The beautiful is beautiful, old, new, or some strange, perky cauldron mix. But man still lives horizon-mad inside his head. Horizons constitute great art." I feel a sudden trembling in my arms. He sits there with his aging face, calm, strong, his judgements on the world sealed in the veins that trace their way from limbs and surface flesh into the pounding of the blood-gorged heart. Rage wells unthinking from my trembling arms into my legs and chest, a watery rage that leaves me feeling weak and half afraid. "Somehow I feel imprisoned in the new," I say. "The publishers and critics hound toward a will-o-wisp that vanishes when touched. Originality! Originality!" He looks at me, eyes blue, face red, hair gray, his silence angry at my sudden rage. "There's new inside the old sometimes," he says at last, consideration in his voice. "A spun gray chrysalis as plain as gray wasp nests divides to free a butterfly's fresh wings." My rage subsides. I calmly shake my head. "The butterfly repeats a pattern born when flowers marked the death of dinosaurs and mammals started dominating continents," I say. "The butterfly is old, not new." He laughs. "There's nothing new beneath the sun, the Preacher says," he says. "There's nothing new!" I smile and nod. His blue eyes stare at me as guileless as a cloud-free summer sky. He shakes his head. "You're wrong," he says. "You're wrong. Each butterfly unfolding birth-wet wings is new. It's never felt the brush of wind; its colors tremble at the feel of sky stretched taut against the skin of earth. It's new." I stare at him, amazed by poetry.