For Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) (written at the Crocker Art Museum)

The unknown artist takes an account of death
while the beast on the left swims in the skeleton bowl.
She pulls a glistening trout from the silt river--
this is nothing new, but no one has done this before.
Her color and form fill this space
on the radical edge of dusk.
In the museum, the light never changes.
The still life remains still. People walk past.
She responds to the purple edges of the river
in episodes of devotion.
The magnetic red current pulls the painter
to the mountains; but he cannot paint like a German
because Germans are out of favor in 1918.
The re-created flower tours the world
in a tour-de-force.
On death's wings he paints a stack of books--
white pages up and open to the sky like sails
carrying the dead poet.
On the promenade, three blonde women push
the girl with twisted legs in the wheelchair
towards the river.
I pretend I am a guest at the hotel. I pretend
I am alive. I pretend to be a poet.
I sketch movement #11 on the water.
The building symphony sparkles in glass.
The aspen grows around the rock at its heart,
then dies and washes downriver--
a wooden spindle with stone.
He paints treetops then triangles,
bananas then boxes, flowers then faces--
all call to the mind. I call sound,
direct, my own harmony, this sympathy
with statues, in empathy with the unknown
artist who abandoned intuition, stumbled
through the broken rocks and flotsam
towards the river with trees.

© EPG