I was not an exceptional painter.
I had gotten used to that idea long before--
before the boy was born, before I met my wife and fell in love.
It was good for us that I had made that accommodation
with myself before we met, or I would
have been an unhappy husband and a miserable father,
gnawing at myself for my limits.
What I could do well I did.
I found pleasure in the work so long
as I did not yearn for what I was incapable of becoming
in my dreams--
an artist who painted what had never before been seen
and who thus made the world newer and more interesting.
The boy might do that one day.
He was, I'd like to think, already on that path.
I excelled in paintings of seascapes and harbor scenes--
boats in port at sunset, lighthouses
on cliffs in the world of a white storm I also
did very successfully.
Not very original work but mine.
I like to think work which was rewarded
not lavishly but sufficiently well enough
to keep a decent life.
For my own pleasure, perhaps, with a glow,
the vanity of association, I made
copies of narrative paintings long disregarded
by the modernists but still beloved by a few.
Myself included, obviously.
Poussin was then in process on my easel.
Not him, naturally, but his painting
in which shepherds are contemplating a plinth
inscribed with the words "even in Arcadia I am,"
meaning death is omnipresent even in the most beautiful
places where life richly abounds, where bounty reigns.
I still had time to finish the figure of the shepherdess,
a woman ravishingly solid and simple
like an Ionian temple in a sacred grove of cypresses.
I had been stuck for a while trying to complete her
because each time I painted her face it was not
the face Poussin had rendered but the face of my dead wife.
As if my mind saw one thing but my hand another, and nothing
I did made the face look as I had intended.
I sometimes thought of it as a good thing, a sign of something
original living within me, but finally
I could not let myself--
I could not bring myself to let my little hint
of a romantic autobiography disfigure
Poussin's masterpiece.
So I sponged out my wife's face, leaving the shepherdess's torso
headless in white anonymous space.
Audacity in art and in life was never my style.
Even at the end, when death comes and pays
its one and only visit, I know that I'll
follow him meekly, acquiescent and compliant.
No trouble, I'll say.
Here I come.
I stayed in this self-defeating mood, the best
to keep one from working, for who knows how long,
when the boy rushed in barefoot, pale, and frightened.
Did you have a bad dream, I asked, lifting him up
in my arms.
He did, and when he woke he went first
to my room, where I was not, and then
to his nana's room, where she was sleeping in a strange way.
When he tried to wake her, she would not wake,
and so he came to me.
She was still in her bed sleeping, her book open.
She was sleeping with blank eyes fixed on words.
Was the story that bad, mom, I wanted to ask,
that you would rather have died than continue reading it,
calling for death to spare you from another boring syllable.
Nana was sleeping a sleep of sorts, I told my son--
the sleep that carries you to the edge of life
and then drops you into another life, one which we could not
join while still awake.
That is what I told him.
She was now where his mother had gone, where we would all
one day go, where our souls would go, his and mine too.
The soul, I said, thinking it was now
the best time to tell him, was that strange, unknown,
invisible thing he felt inside himself when
he made drawings of sounds.
He knew that, he said.
He had known for a long time because nana
had taught him that years ago.
But all that didn't matter because he wanted his nana here
with him and not with them.
With whom do you mean, I asked.
With the men in the ship, he said.
He had dreamed that she was taken there
and that was what had woken him-- his dream of her
being carried away to the ship.
So he was glad when he saw that she was still there
in bed until he realized when she would not
wake that it was the other invisible part of her
that they had taken away.
That was a sweet dream, I said, but it was only a dream.
It was not a dream, he said.
She was there on that ship, and, he added firmly,
we should go there and rescue her.