White Cat and Notebook: A Still Life

in memory of Lynda Hull (1954–1994)

     . . .

                                                    —Richard Diebenkorn

Rain hushes this February morning,

that same infusing chill

that once entered the slim bones

of your hands, until they ached, flushed

and swollen joints another

of your body’s betrayals; that laved

the grit of your radiant cities, brassy

asphalt fragrance rising, mnemonic,

off the charged streets, minor chords

of your unappeasable ghosts

laddering its scent on the weather.

Here, this small midwestern

city’s muffled in winter’s cottony greys,

the landlocked sky impassive

as the calendar squares telling these

mortal days’ inexorable slide

to the anniversary I refuse to mark

in. For hours I’ve been reading

theories of painting, how the dulled

edges of kitchen knives, poppies

fading in a glass, a frayed jacket, resolve

to surrogates for the figure, signs

of figural absence denoting presence . . .

summoning your Chicago rooms I’ve known

only in letters, the coruscating poems

you called these notes to myself,

imagining objects you once touched,

for a still life I might paint for you.

     Still life, in Diebenkorn’s interpretation . . . is the process of creating an

    intense unity from which everything dispensable has been removed because

    the pressure of feeling required it. . . . Parts have to be assembled of course,

    before some can be removed.

—John Elderfield, Figure and Field

I can plot them on a canvas

in my mind: the yellowed dressmaker’s

dummy, straight-pins piercing

the bird-down slope of breast, shape

rounded as Monroe’s, behind it the window

through which you watched blown skies

mapped with billboards and spiked

antennas, fading rose contrails, frame

for the El’s sparking tracks echoing

the mannequin’s curves, the question mark

lines of the white cat preening

on the sill. I can sketch a scarred deal

table, circa 1930, in the foreground,

on it, creamy gouache of a highball glass

perspiring beside pill bottles, their labels

rough white strokes, a few pointillist

dots of prescription type; behind them,

a notebook, snake of rubber tubing

coiled, toxic, in the slumbering kit. But no.

Four years now since I got the call.

Louise could not repeat what I could not

bear to hear: say it again, say it again,

I sang, hoarse cuckoo with my mainspring

come wildly unsprung.

     . . . represented forms are loaded with psychological

  feeling. It can’t ever be just painting.

—Richard Diebenkorn

Four years and still the images break down.

Lynda, I don’t know what I believe

about where you are now, or whether

my words dissolve like mist

in etherous air. I can’t conjure you

among these scumbled layers: clusters

of family photos, a translucent bride

in overpainted silk and fedora, cherries

a slash of ruby pigment darkening

the brim: can’t find you in the gleam

of aluminum crutches reflecting

off the illusion of her captured face.

Details fail to coalesce. But the carmine

and silver amulet box you sent me

from Cuba—when you lose your faith,

take mine for you, on lavender tissue—

still blesses my desk, whispers it’s not folly

to believe that once, months beyond

your death, I felt the heat of your living

arm shawl my shoulders. Teacher,

even if it’s true elegy’s fated

to be most about the living, pictures,

always, to be first the story of the painter’s

subjective eye, I’ll complete this one

for you, paint out everything dispensable

till all that remains is the ivory cat,

your sleek familiar, like Hermes

beside the window, and the open notebook;

paint in a wash of violet

for your elegantly scrawled lines.