Rick Benjamin - Pentimento lyrics

[In memory of Peter De Jode] means regret, one buried under years of longing or two or three making skin tingle as from touches you will never forget. A painter carves into layers past memories frozen in tableau: a brother's suicide, a mother's electric shock treatment. Abstract, we say, because the world as we've seen it can be so unbearable. Which is why we try to read into dusty ghosts where perhaps old appliances sat, tarred rooflines still on sides of row-houses long after next-doors have been demolished, charcoal shadows of what were once craters, eruptions erasing edges, only rims remaining. There are hundreds of texts bereft of their past lives, wax tablets where countless scribes left their delible marks. He sees gold leaf on the surface & wonders how to mine those few veins. No regrets.