Summer Landscape—Stuart Davis
(by Mark Doty) This happy bit of Modernism could almost be our town—white houses’ simple geometry complexified by scatter, angles of roofs and fences, one cheerful tree, a yellow band of dunes. A rippling harbor interpenetrates everything: watery planes between scribbled clouds, jumble of masts and riggings, spars, blue surface, black dinghy, this shingled expanse of shadow, and he’s even painted around his Cubist seaside town a border, each side a different color (pink and black, yellow and fence-picket white) as if to emphasize how firmly this place is framed, known through all the art that’s been made of it, till it’s a painting of itself: light heightened and arranged. Exactly what our town’s been doing, these new-season days out to impress with the sheer bravado of what the atmosphere’s done this time. Yesterday a final slant of afternoon lit up with heart-firing warmth the rusting side of a white boat tied to the town pier. Heaven, just then, and something like the way a familiar face flares present in candlelight, depths made clear in the slightest flame . . . Then gone, leaving a plain white flank starred with rust, perfectly handsome but nothing to shout about —as people actually did, walking on Commercial, when they saw the harbor bathed in rose. Weeks now, on the spire of the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, a red scaffolding’s ringed the crown, square-boned New England earnestness gaining a jaunty bit of costume: our spire disguised, for the season, as a minaret, or a lighthouse in Alexandria, or the high tower room of some exiled sultan’s fabled realm . . . What a little bit of red can do! Inside, whale-tooth medallions jewel the pews, and walls and ceiling deceive with ornate grisaille, the trompe l’oeil work of a genius architectural painter passing through, who drew a hundred years of eyes up the long lines of his false columns to the gorgeous details of his false vault —over which the steeple climbs like a steamstack into the blue. I keep imagining, every day, walking by, how the view from up there would tumble in a density of gardens and dormers, our rooftops splayed in fractal array. The perfect place, if it were our work in the world simply to attend to light, these shows given hourly-- Look now: that ultraviolet curtain’s drawn, and phantom stagehands trundle from the wings a bank of shade, looming, cloud-belly blue. Scratch that; here’s a sudden wash of sun, classical in its severity, striking all shadows from the stage. I have a friend, Jade, a carpenter who goes about her work in silver bangles, bracelets overlaid on each arm, which seem as much part of her tool kit as hammer and pry bar and her marine-blue pickup truck. Dependable and brave, she flashes in the sun, mornings, when she mounts the steeple, which now is scraped to nude intensity, pine planks breathing salt air again, shed of their pickling paint. Her task: the regilding of the acanthus, our spire’s once-golden flourish angling up into summer air. Who knew? All these years it’s been a briny, verdigrised blue, but Jade restores it to a luster unremembered here. She poses high above the woodblock print of a town, the steady, chilly harbor, and anchors to the sturdy tip a crown. (from Source: HarperCollins, 2001) |