Page 30 - WTP VOl. XII #1

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Portrait of
Mrs. Thomas Eakins (1899)
She looks too sad to love him, can’t forgive his need
to get the light right on her chin, can’t rejoice how his obsession has temporarily pushed aside the wish
to photograph men and boys, can’t forget his river
of debt and discouragement, or his cold disdain
for imprecision. He was forty when they wed.
Whitman said he was “a force of nature,”
not a painter, but she tried to contain him like a valley cradles a storm. They made no children in a life
hidden by facts—was she barren or had he lost interest in her biology? He loved women like cats,
they were his familiars; none of his men crack
with this much emotion
or share his evident disappointment in the future.
Hopper’s Rooms by The Sea (1951)
He lived long enough to try it,
a room without an isolated figure not even Jo
no usher at the movies
no frumpy furniture
no mansard roofs
or any other urban clue,
an imaginary space in which diagonal sunlight enters knife-like slices through a blue-gray wall until his interior view floats out towards the horizon
of sea and sky
leaving its door wide open—
an almost empty room
after someone unseen has left perhaps
for the narrow room next door
or did his soul
jump over the threshold
into the ocean
disappearing like Magritte, someone who has tired of reality?
Michael salcMan