The Float

It's not 6 feet under, like they say; it's 6 feet above. But no one looks up. My passing in review. It is museum-quality art on parade--my transitions on this canvas that can be painted so colorfully, imaginatively, and with lines of motion; hues of joy and great sadness. With beautiful strokes or blemishes of life's ugliness. Yet, like a parade, my float joins the others in a promenade of ostentatious exhibition.

Above me.

Supine and prone at the same time, I rest indecisively in a Picasso perspective of 360 degrees (and more!). It's relativistic, isn't it? The angles? The contexts? Now, with the right focal depth I can view from all my points of intersection that is the kaleidoscope of legacy: spinning shards of color that whirled insensibly before but clearly make sense now.

Over me.

Upstairs, downstairs, fooling me to think I'm going somewhere, but listen, you: M. C. Escher says I'm there already--"Just stop for a moment on any landing between coincident staircases and cast off the visual illusion"--a contradiction to life against which I rest irresolute. Birds in view that morph from white to black; and dogs to dogs, and knights to knights, and regular divisions of my planes. How my life reached an asymptote spread in two dimensions by the artist's pen. It's all there for me to see and it's beautiful.

Below me.

There for all to see, my Blue period, my Golden period, all my periods--and my commas and semicolons and ampersands. My colors are complementary: green for red, purple for yellow, and orange for blue. I've washed out from primary colors to pastels, and I mix to make the van Gogh composites that define me--purples versus yellows to contrast the darkness of the night with the stellar summons I solicit--my own Starry Night. There's movement on my canvas and I rest, pleased, in careful splashes.

Higher than me.

I'm a filter that creates uneven light, starkly contrasting my present to my dormant past. The differences between this-and-that and that-and-this no longer matter, explained by a Rembrandt and Banksy chiaroscuro. The contrasts are startling, but are they really contrasts? Or contrarian interdigitations.

Aside me.

To you, I'm dead. Still life, but lifeless, still. A bowl of fruit, expired, and priced for quick sale. A room-temperature object eyed hungrily by Paul Cézanne someplace and somehow. So still, my vessel, which split the waves in life so defiantly and deftly, now a hulk doomed to rust in stagnant waters. How different the eyes of the living are from those of the dead! Where mourners see an objet d'art, I see my art--proper art--a triptych of past, present, and future.

Spreading out from me.

How different time is for the living and for the dead! My past is a canvas of Parrishian light and color, used to enchant, but fading and dimming quickly now, soon to be invisible minutes soon after the living depart my funeral. My present is a transition of hues, blended to something else, implying I am moving still, a refutation of the body that lies in state at my vigil; my future loses the stark contrasts and harsh lighting, steering me away from Bosch toward the inviting sublime landscapes of Romanticism, where I now no longer rest but wander abstractly in Friedrich-envisioned possibilities.

After me.

Below is my underpainting, my remains in the Giotto mode. Time spares no work of art--the work in progress, that begs to be corrected, redone, and repainted for every vérité du jour. Truth changes with the world; and what I accepted changed with me along the way, which is the way of the world. The different strata of my life, one atop the other, repainted with epiphanies, apologies, wrong turns, and mid-course corrections. I regard myself as that composite of growth and can now see my finished work. I've spent my life stacking the deck of a mixed media that now lies on display; I rest, complete.

Surprising me.