Packaging the Paintings
Brandon Cook
Imagine packing and crating the artist's paintings,
Playing the corner edges just slightly, without tweaking the frames, so that they can be shipped across oceans in air-tight cases,
Hazarding their way across salt and ice and the great undulating drifts, a case enclosed in steel and ship
To be opened on a far shore, by immigrant hands grateful for work,
And then sent on by coach and train, across the plains
When they arrive, images of white marble ruins jut from a green garden, under azure skies
And a cobalt storm races down an unnamed coast, above a fishing boat, while
A mountainside teems with wildflowers and a deer looks up, beneath an Alpine hill
Each is to hang above a mantle in a well-appointed house, so that, for a moment,
Those who see the scene have a glimmer of ecstasy—
Their longing stirred up so fiercely that they have to look away
Still,
Soon enough they will all look too quickly, and then not at all
Someday, they will see nothing, as if the painting—by strange alchemy—has become only a wall, and the frame no more than a shape to take up space
So that the place within that wants to stake a claim (in a gracious garden, in a boat, or on mountain slope)
Will not feel anything too deeply, nor be disturbed by too much wanderlust
Soon enough they will see no pigment at all
Will see, only, a filled-space, and no need to further decorate
But their children:
They will come into the study on a cold afternoon when warm, orange light pours profligately through the window,
And they will wonder if such things can be, mouths agape
They will ask if the artist actually saw or created raw, out of pure mind,
Marveling that such climes might exist,
Calculating what it will take to break their tethered mooring lines and fly to find them
Promising in themselves to never compromise
Imagine encasing such longings in a crate
Imagine discovering that we ourselves are the ship, with paintings full of longing ready to emerge like paint from an artist's tube
Imagine all this packed so deeply inside us
Waiting to be revealed