LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

Long day painting by myself down by the lake

where I used to paint with you many years ago,

and now your absence haunts my solitude

as I grey my greens with cool alizarin red

and though the trees and the water are the same

it’s a much eerier world just to know once

you who were here with me, are utterly gone,

and what has carried on without you, though

I’m affably intimate with its creative characteristics

is wholly estranged from the name I’ll write on this painting.

As if an era in art had passed. Dreams and assumptions,

things you take for granted because in living them

you sometimes must, like love and oxygen,

and the presumption of life going on between us,

for the most part unplanned,

but a commingling of waters nevertheless,

a sharing in the other’s quiet amazement

that the other exists as they are in your mindscape at all.

A heron rises from the cattails in the shallows.

A fish jumps at a dragonfly on the tip of a sword

of the wild irises in a muddle of mystic indigo

and a sulphur butterfly struggles in the thick pthalo blue

of the sky I slashed in with my painting knife

as if I were grouting the canvas like a mason

to lay a fieldstone wall that wouldn’t keep the birds out

that have learned to ignore me like a scarecrow

in warpaint ghost dancing at an easel

spreading its legs like a doe

come out of the woods

to drink quietly from its own reflection.

Everything seems thriving and deserted.

The waterlilies still clutter the wild rice

like prolific constellations of the frogs

whose singing doesn’t sound all that bad after awhile.

I’m a curiosity to the fox

that’s been taking a profound interest in my work

all afternoon as if I were some kind of savage impressionist

and it were a cultural savant with a few pointed suggestions.

Two raccoons luxuriating like moss on a femur of oak

behind me, watching me underpaint the lakeshore rocks

like two kids through the wire fence of a construction site.

Events of the day. Transactional armies in the grass,

bees and ruby-throated humming birds

enabling the daylilies like pyromaniacs

and soon, the green dragon of the sumac

will burn in the auto de fe of the fall as well.

But you are not here to mention it to

and compared to the quality of the isolation

I once lived here with you in paradise

the beauty of my painting lacks the highlights

and finished details I used to attend to

knowing how they’d shine by the light of your eyes

as an effect of the atmospherics you brought to the scene.

And though everything appears the same,

it’s uncanny not to be heading homewards

with the shadows and the crows

as you and I did so many nights

well pleased with what

we laboured for all day in the sun

to a farmhouse full of paintings

whose windows cling to the remaining light

as we did like waterbirds for awhile

around a lake full of constellations

as the Eagle, the Swan and the Lyre,

went down behind the abstract expressions

of the sad geometry of the barn roof

weary of rusting like wavelengths of rippled tin,

not knowing whether it’s holding out

against the wind, the rain, the field fires

or still holding something empty

as an urn full of stars

that were scattered like chimney sparks

on one of the coldest nights of my life, in.

PATRICK WHITE