Provenance

                                                                    Le Bateau-atelier (1874)
                                    The Studio Boat
Kröller-Müller Museum

Pinned to my corkboard, 3X5 glossy less
image than brief citation
at the bottom of a page, beach pebble
on a kitchen windowsill, dried bit of heather
crushed between the leaves
of Wuthering Heights.

                A ripple on the river's surface. Fading sheen,
                fragile boundary of air
                and water. Shadows stretch
                from the other shore.  Mirror-
                still. As the river breathes.

Forty-two Dutch guilders at the museum
store, rolled into cardboard tube, tucked
into her bag. On the train back to Amsterdam
from Otterlo, lulled by the rocking of the cars--
of the little boat--, she dreamt
her delicious theft.

(Another forty dollars at the frame shop on Broadway, just
around the corner from their Riverside
apartment. No Hudson glimpsed from those
smudged windows. She craved a river view.)

                Hazy impression of woods and farmhouse
                on the distant bank. Trees rusty,
                gray. Wavering reflections draw
                the eye. Two lines, two poles, a mooring?
                The painter's floating studio--all that light
                on a palm of dark. 

Eight years it hung above her writing
desk, reminder of a drowsy
gallery in a woodland park, how it warmed that roof,
cooled those splintery, green-
painted boards, leaving no words
to name the colors. Only texture.

                We can't see in. Can't quite discern the painter as he
                cleans his brushes, peering out the open door to watch
                a pair of ducks, invisible to us, drifting among the lilies
                by the shore. We cannot see Camille on her low cot,
                keeping him company, book in hand. The door is open
                but we can't see in.        

Later my father mailed that picture back
to their friend in Amsterdam, memory
of the afternoon the three had shared in Otterlo. Kept
just the snapshot and its echo
of a different journey when--
match struck in the Giverny kitchen, all those
yellow chairs!--she'd cried out, she could see
the painter himself
brushing color onto wood!

                It's the dark hull.
                I'm sitting on the verge, looking out across
                to that imagined place, his painted world and where
                he paints it from.

And now I've taken it as talisman, as footnote, to keep company
in my turn. Mere scrawl along a margin of my
losses. Image
reaching back to image reaching back
to canvas, back to wood,
to water ... Manhattan, Otterlo,
Argenteuil.

                It's the dark hull.

I've taken it to keep company with how
he painted the outside, and the inside. How
I now can see obliquely through
to where each saw
what the other saw
and how it holds us there.

                It's the dark hull
                and its reflection, catching my breath
                as the river breathes.               
               






                                                                (c) Karen McPherson 2015