Through the Gates at Alderworks

When you go through the gates at Alderworks, you enter Jim and Dorothy’s vision of a utopia in process. Their barn-like home is the first building, set apart by a yard decorated with wood sculptures and metal barrel hoops and rusting bits of vintage machinery among the plants. A horse pasture with two horses plus pens for pigs, geese, ducks, and chickens separate their area from the 3 residency cabins, art studio, and various out buildings. A pile of lumber, palettes of river rock, and a back hoe for the new studio that’s under construction let you know that this dream is in process, as well as by the gardens of sapling trees and tiny plants. There’s a beautiful vegetable garden with raised beds and a greenhouse, all maintained by a young man named Justin. Everything is surrounded and embraced by a forest of spruce and alder with tall snowy peaks beyond.

Our cabin is the largest of the residency cabins. Log walls, wood stove, claw foot tub, big iron bed, it’s cozy and comfortable. It has two rooms, so Ed has claimed a small table in the bedroom where he can write in silence. His goal is to select and refine a collection of his poems and short prose writings for a book. Here’s one:

Poem Found Scrawled on the Simple Man’s Bathroom Wall

On certain nights in winter

when the moon is new,

I remove my clothes,

leap out my upstairs window

and fly above the rooftops,

studying the constellations

for signs of things to come.

                                                                     

Against the silence of the elms

I feel the world’s radio waves

pass through my chest,

tickling my lungs with their

lovely static.

I am a simple man, yet

over and over I peruse my life

and find myself wanting.

Above satellite dishes and

abandoned drive-ins

I swim through ozone

dreaming of better days.

I am a simple man.

I enjoy simple pleasures:

a cool baseball nested in my palm,

an old cat brushing my ankle,

the minty taste of stars

dissolving on my tongue.

I forgive everyone for everything

from my safe, high distance.

I like to lose myself

in the indomitable violet sky,

an ascending balloon swallowed

by the absence of light.

I paint in the front room, moving between a window and the kitchen table, depending on the light. More about my work later.