Nothing could be much simpler than this blue and clear white
nozzled bottle for misting plants
ficus bengamina elephant umbrella or avocado
sitting like a vase or a salad bowl at the centre of a plain
table supported by orange-
crates against the bright sunny red brick wall of our second-
floor sun deck.
I could go to the museum this afternoon or
the new show at the art gallery
but this simple industrial misting bottle holds my attention:
the sunlight frames it
illuminates it
fills the clear blue & white half-full bottle with light,
although it would somehow contain light even in a dark room
sitting on the pine floor beside the bengamina
or on a shelf in the bathroom beside some clean towels.
Part of this may be phallic and another part may be the
classic Bauhaus argument for functional form.
Phallic is possible.
I muse over this sitting sprawled in my khaki shorts on a
square cloth chair in the bright sun on the deck
looking from a distance like a clear object in space myself.
My left arm photographs the waters of my heart.
My right lobe is full of tobacco and peach trees.
The deep blue & white nozzle of the bottle is attractive
but the nozzle doesn’t spurt water
it sprays, it mists
and is inexhaustible;
North America is full of phallic-shaped tins and bottles:
wine bottles
beer tins
bottled beer
most olive oil bottles and vinegar containers
even a tin of fava beans could be called phallic.
Dark blue is one of my favourite colours,
Galt night skies and union jacks and stars & stripes.
The bottle doesn’t rival Rembrandt’s The Old Warrior or
Vermeer’s Head of a Young Girl, but it makes short work of
bad painting and schlock television alike.
Whatever it is sits honest as a piece of limestone
or a loaf of fresh bread.
Limestone and bread aren’t phallic. I muse on the da/dunh dunh
dunh with which Beethoven begins moving to climax in his ninth
symphony and on the tragedy of Mark Rothko’s butchered
throat.
Crane died young.
The human body is composed of one functional
shape after another. Stones down a hill. I am grateful for this
mass-produced $1.79 bottle: it is both pleasant to look at
and a perfect simple stimulus. It is clear the way I want to be
clear myself, although some parts of my mind are like the dark
water under a bridge.
My shoulders are red. The sun on the brick
wall and the orange-crate are also parts of this picture.