No Rehearsal, gouache on paper, 20" by 16" by Josie Gray

See, Sea, Sleeve, Leaves by Tess Gallagher

 

This painting and poem are offered together for $1200.
Please contact us for more information.

 

 

For Josie Gray

The sun is coming up
on the painting Josie left for me
on the easel, a landscape of my yard, so
at a glance, I am both inside
and out. Leaves have fallen in each,
with the difference of my not being
called to rake the painting. Incalculable
shadow of wall cuts through trees, then dissolves
as sun gets more democratic inside—yet so bright out
the yard blinds into pure space, and, except for the painting,
I might lift off the planet altogether.

Sun illuminates my sleeve cuff as I take in
a blue slant line wherein the changeable magic
of the painting throws the world away
with profit. I am to sell the painting,
but morning to morning, because I share
coffee and sunlight with it, I will sell something in
and not in the pigment. Ken already thinks
he might buy it, admiring from a photo.
This intrudes sweetly as belonging, and I try not to let
the painting subsume me, as it pretends
not to, as it does, in the way
of all love stories—that sneaking up of desire
with its gradual pouncing motive.

Three trees, one red. A black
oblong shadow nuzzles the trunk
of the center tree. I don’t care what
this is the shadow of (Love like that too.)
Nor what absent sun has formed or concealed
itself as shadow. Pure shadow-ness
claims its ground, yet suggests
it could shift, if I insist on calling it
“shadow.” Whereas, it is always more than
shadow in the painting: a fragment
of space haunts the whole of space—another
love story, and why I prefer that painted
“unknown” in my counterfeit yard
above all others. But without the painted blue

slant behind trees I would
lose interest altogether. It makes
no “sense.” Is not shadow, or anything in
the world, yet animates, as Josie does, with horizon
being here in his painting and not,
in his outside, of Ireland. Which I need
like the sea in my head needs a shore to take
eyes. His heaping up of leaves
in the foreground is another horizon,
a shoring up that domesticates
shadow, cuts it off from
foreboding. My days, all our days now

hinged with foreboding, like Belfast-days
when crossing any threshold meant frisking
the tide. How many hands would we need
to do that? Remembering the story
of one failed frisking, how it changed
the music of twin fiddlers forever,
their bluest horizon shattered by the bomb
attached to a toilet handle so one twin’s wrist
was ignominiously sundered. He was “spared”
to play again, not as perfectly matched
to his brother as before, the wrist stiffened
by injury, by its shadow-fusion to
an absent moment. Yet, having been suddenly
unmatched—were the fingers
more determined to draw down music from
its taller shell? Some

said so. That by their nature, their wish
to join, the twins managed to outleap
the bad business. Once though,
I caught the contortion of one twin’s face
and saw the music cost him more.
Stiff-bridge-of-pain I heard, accompanied by
undertow-of-joy so nimble
the which-from-which of my mind did not so much as
heal that hand, that wrist, as let a human violin
sister me.

And yes, I could sell Ken my yard
in the painting, but not
the blue stab of color Josie left for me
into which some lilac-blend of mind
has laved, has frisked imperfectly
my skull, rubbing cat-like against
his seeing—sleeve that caresses the disembodied wrist,
recovered again and again as far music, as
my painted yard communing with me, twin to
twin. Until, in a turn of head, I discover

six deer browsing the lowest limbs
of the apple trees—adding to the painting
the world’s deer-glance, its hunger
for leaves before winter. As if any true seeing
doubles the small ever-white hand of experience, gives
the more-than-can-be-seen: otherwise,
why take the trouble, as with spirits,
to let them in?
 

Copyright © 2004 Tess Gallagher