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JoJene Mills's avatar

"These places, these places, this short and sacred life…" Indeed.

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Robin Flicker's avatar

Thank you for sharing these remembrances, George. To my bones, I understand how a place can be a pal. Your encomium to your home, well loved, lived, and worked in, has been beautiful and moving. I hope that it’s been useful to you to share this process and some of the gold you’ve mined with your finds.

The involuntary look inside your head is amazing. I’m so glad you saved it. What strikes me most is how all those characters -- varied as they are -- seem to posses what is a hallmark of not only your work but your way of being, that is, characterized by a sense of well -meaning and kindness. Even when your characters are doing things that will not serve well, there is always the sense of their fundamental striving to be the best they can be and the interconnectedness among people despite their differences. I’m not sure if what I’m saying makes sense but to my sensibility, it’s all there, in the look inside the makings of your mind.

Time and memory, hoo boy, indeed.

For reasons I can’t exactly explain, the phrase that comes to mind is “life and the memory of it,” from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem called “Poem,” which is about a pretty worthless painting that’s been handed down (as Bishop herself was) from family member to family member. In the poem, the painting (done by an Uncle) is given to her. At first Bishop can’t warm to it; a painter herself, she can appreciate the technical details, but it’s not until she “recognizes the place,” that the poem changes and we feel her nearness to it and to the uncle who painted it. I hope the poem, below, resonates for you and others herein.

Warmly, and with gratitude,

Robin

POEM

About the size of an old-style dollar bill,

American or Canadian,

mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays

-this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)

has never earned any money in its life.

Useless and free., it has spent seventy years

as a minor family relic handed along collaterally to owners

who looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to.

It must be Nova Scotia; only there

does one see abled wooden houses

painted that awful shade of brown.

The other houses, the bits that show, are white.

Elm trees., low hills, a thin church steeple

-that gray-blue wisp-or is it? In the foreground

a water meadow with some tiny cows,

two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows;

two minuscule white geese in the blue water,

back-to-back,, feeding, and a slanting stick.

Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,

fresh-squiggled from the tube.

The air is fresh and cold; cold early spring

clear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky

below the steel-gray storm clouds.

(They were the artist's specialty.)

A specklike bird is flying to the left.

Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?

Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!

It's behind-I can almost remember the farmer's name.

His barn backed on that meadow. There it is,

titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple,

filaments of brush-hairs, barely there,

must be the Presbyterian church.

Would that be Miss Gillespie's house?

Those particular geese and cows

are naturally before my time.

A sketch done in an hour, "in one breath,"

once taken from a trunk and handed over.

Would you like this? I'll Probably never

have room to hang these things again.

Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George,

he'd be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother

when he went back to England.

You know, he was quite famous, an R.A....

I never knew him. We both knew this place,

apparently, this literal small backwater,

looked at it long enough to memorize it,

our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,

or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).

Our visions coincided-"visions" is

too serious a word-our looks, two looks:

art "copying from life" and life itself,

life and the memory of it so compressed

they've turned into each other. Which is which?

Life and the memory of it cramped,

dim, on a piece of Bristol board,

dim, but how live, how touching in detail

-the little that we get for free,

the little of our earthly trust. Not much.

About the size of our abidance

along with theirs: the munching cows,

the iris, crisp and shivering, the water

still standing from spring freshets,

the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

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