How a soul might wear rain

Distant Thunder ~ Andrew Wyeth

Stillbrush
For Andrew Wyeth

It’s the way light settles the room, caressing
perhaps a fine curve of breast, tracing without
touching, an insubstantiality divined by its nature.

Doing this as one sips coffee or opens a window
at the outset of a freshening sky speaks to how
a soul might wear rain in the spring. An umbrella
may well belie a need for practicality, but this is
something else entirely. We know now that canvas
cannot contain the sound of a clock. Stand close
and breathe hyacinth and scrubgorse in scented
fields. Wear mudded seaboots that might spook
a distant herd of clouds. Tat lace in slow shadows
that linger in the dropped veil of a long afternoon.

We will keep the felled figure. We will keep the boy
in the coonskin cap. We will keep the nautilus in its
sorrowed chamber. We will keep the shut door in its
blueness. And we will keep the woman praised on her
knees by a failing star. He will take the rest. All of it.

Joseph Gallo
January 16, 2009


Spring ~ Andrew Wyeth