Two If by Sea (cont.)

2. “Wind from the Sea”

"Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?"
            Andrew Wyeth, from Wanda M. Corn's The Art of Andrew Wyeth

After an argument
we walk in starlight
down the train tracks together
till we're far out of town
my foolish heart and I. . .

Being one who relishes Andrew Wyeth’s melancholy vision, I often return to his Wind from the Sea. Like nearly all his titles, it’s a plain but deceptive door into the salt-weathered mansion of his art, its depths of feeling. I’m not sure if it’s having grown up in coastal Maine that drives my delight in this work, or whether it’s the confluence of emotions he’s thrown down like loaded dice.

Is it the straw-colored field cut short from running on forever by the dark tree-line holding it at bay? Do the curving wheel ruts incite one to follow them to the water’s edge or to wherever they lead,

          or is it that the wide, oblique angle of the field’s summit yields simultaneously both nearness and unapproachable vastness? Though little more than a wedge mirroring the white sky, the sea rules the painting as it should and must, as Wyeth made it so, for great art builds its house in our bones with walls as mighty as granite and yet as gossamer as the flutter of sheer white curtains,

          as ethereal as the sudden wail of a loon asserts its being from within the mists of a breaking day.

i.
As the old poplar 
slowly adds another ring,
generations come and go
in lifetimes little more to it
than a brief summer shower

     ii.
     At times, in early twilight,
     the old widow will open her window 
     and closing her eyes
     taste on the wind
     another sea, another country

iii.
At low tide's ebb,
like the strands of Hitomaro's "jewels"
that cling to boulders,
seaweed shines and glitters
in the same bright sun

     iv.
     It's the music
     that never quiets,
     sung long before
     there were ears to hear it,
     the cadences of breakers . . .

v.
The sea rises and falls
outside the open window,
soundtrack
for an elderly couple
coupling

     vi.
     The unloved brother
     came home drunk again
     and fell asleep on his porch,
     seagulls piercing 
     each of his dreams

vii.
It flew in
on winds from the sea
and left through the same window,
a sparrow
while the old lobsterman slept

     viii.
     In enormous hands
     callused and swollen
     from a lifetime of labor
     he buries a face
     etched    in wind-burn and creases

ix.
. . . and when his niece
comes to visit him in his ward of four
speaking only in Finnish,
tears wash up on the beaches
of his remembrance.

In memory of Karl Mäki of Finntown, Maine, once a young orderly’s patient

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About the Author

Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.