28 Petit

must be precisely placed in its matrix. Here where there is no oxygen and the cold stings like a furnace, our eyes spin like constellations as we sew tapestries on our stellar frames and let them drop through the slits in the walls. We who have no voice hear the snow’s musical swirl across matter, sense through our fingertips a face emerging from Khumbu Glacier. We weigh nothing, and our cloth when it’s new weighs less than us before it sets in its stone cage. We never tire, knowing that the folds that form under great pressure spurt wings, and Chomolungma grows higher each year, homesick. We add temples around her base, work harder, the earth pouring through our palms.

Portrait of a Coast Redwood Forest with Mandolin

When the first ray pierces my canvas I breathe on its shaft, make solar music. It’s in these early hours of a painting’s life that my palette becomes a mandolin, its thumb-hole

a soundhole plucked by brushes. My eye darts from foliage to fog. I try to paint the deep notes of these ancients, how the bass rises from their roots