Subject / Matter

“All great artists are in love with subject matter…”
John Marin

The shadow on the shed
in the shape of the tree’s great arm
describes the homely affection I feel
for the lexicon of reds layered on old barns.
A ghost branch, the penumbra turns
a trick of light, and I’m off listing beauty’s dark
properties: shutter atilt, tin roof scored
and pocked, John Marin’s Winter From My Back Window,
Cliffside, New Jersey, 1929. Not a painting
you’d associate with him, this jumble of roof lines
bristling with snow, low buildings, wooden
sides heaving with heat, cold, energy, his pallet
of gray and brown.
All year I’ve watched
with the American modernists the country
contract, expand, break apart, stratocumulus:
on the stained-glass surf of Long Island,
on 6th Avenue with my love, in the turn-of-the-century
Village splintering, vertical and at Pier Forty, percussive
gale hammering where the Hudson dips and twists,
into the City’s divisible canyons, my fist a star
around the cold apartment keys. All year love
makes of me the modernist who could not sleep,
who joined the Cubist revolution
after the Salon of 1908, and broke
from himself, and returned to North America
on a written sea of bone, glass, metal, paint.

—Robin Becker

Reprinted from Prairie Schooner, Volume 75, Number 3, Fall 2001, by permission of the author.