Abstraction Is Enchanted Ground and I Have Something Terrible to Paint before Harvest Time and: Early Explorer's Journal

Abstract

ion Is Enchanted Ground and I Have Something Terrible to Paint before Harvest Time and: Early Explorer's Journal Desiree Alvarez Prairie Schooner, Volume 85, Number 3, Fall 2011, pp. 11-13 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: For additional information about this article Access provided by your local institution (21 Feb 2017 20:09 GMT) https://doi.org/10.1353/psg.2011.0121 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/454137 11 how he hated driving trucks, wishing he had kept to carpentry and woodwork. There was a shed behind the little house he bought that he talked about turning into a workshop, but now so many years after he has died, nearly a decade, the door to that shed hangs by the hinges, nothing inside but old tires, grease rags torn from uniform shirts and dish towels, and a solid block of light from a high window, the cracked one that must have let the unfinished future, half a life of chairs, shelves, and bed frames never built, seep out and away. Desiree Alvarez Abstraction Is Enchanted Ground and I Have Something Terrible to Paint before Harvest Time A wheatfield, the linen sofa grandfather sat on before lying down to die. My brain holds more than my heart and my hands, hungry and vast. On the sofa he wears a crown of velvet and cardboard. 12 I am beside him in my princess dress, my feet a world away from floor. Infinity surrounds us and we don’t know it in the last. The rest of my life remembers him holding me high in Atlantic wind, above sand stinging four-year-old legs. Choose the richest blue for water, thirty browns for beach grass. Blend into sky where tree begins and ends. The title finds its source in a letter from Vincent van Gogh to Emile Bernard in which van Gogh refers to abstraction as enchanted ground. Early Explorer’s Journal When they disembarked, the sound of wild birds was deafening. Of course they would have to be killed. When I cannot imagine the unimaginable I know that somewhere someone can, ruthlessly, passionate. In the laboratory the young pigeon looks into the cage’s mirror to become female. This is the meaning of beauty. 13 I bought a cage and drew a pair of eyes to put inside, hanging from the perch. I look at it for hours. Prophecy of opposites: they cause each other. If a thing becomes worse, once it was better. How freedom can be understood. Great-grandfather called all the birds to him sitting in the garden, blind and listening. Lisa Furmanski Allium Look to the allium, and not another word about the son. An ekphrastic, then: ecstatic, romantic: look to arched green, climbing hoods of narcissus, drying to paper. Look to umbrels, sphered violet, a star formation over pursed angels, prudish knots in a spread of leaves. Not another word about him, or his mind, like water rising over rocks, or rocks sitting in water: there it is, the trouble that might be nature. Look at the allium and steady yourself: night cracks through the window overhead, all those cries echoing from woods to sheets, and back. Not another word