Looking at her Paintings
Looking at several of her paintings we had hung together
I comment that I thought her theme was loneliness.
I have one painting here on the wall before my desk:
moored sailboat, its sail gathered at the boom.
I’ve taken to walking on the service road through the wetland.
One of her paintings shows the wetland at dusk.
I am in the habit of walking out into the rushes of my grief.
The geese come down to spend the night in the cold water.
Drawing
for Violet
They are clematis, rose, before the pen-tip
casts a curve of line, before a wash of ink
bathes it with yearning and it changes.
She planted roses and clematis together
saying how one would fill in as the other
died away and always the trellis would be
covered with strung blossoms
and we would not forget nor be without.
Yet we know that yearning is without.
The wash of blossoms only lets us be
while beneath it all a vibrancy will stay
in the fingertips, the stem, the nib,
beginning near the end before without.