After Elizabeth Bishop’s paintings
“It’s big enough so that if you like any section of it, you can cut that part out.”
—from Bishop’s letter to Amy Baumann regarding the painting “Brazilian Landscape”
I want to float when I look at these images or at least tilt my head. Even the buildings seem to lack foundations, as if they might list off a hill and drop into a sea no matter how many lines and cords and wires appear to tether the parts together. Windows, portholes, doors, and gravestones lean slightly off kilter. Rather than marking birth or death dates, the inscriptions read “for sale” as if tomb stones could be carried off in armloads. They’re propped up against a building rather than sunk in the ground. I could pluck a frame from the wall or pick a rock up and put each somewhere else. Even a body in repose on a bed looks like a paper doll that could be moved to another room or dressed in different clothes. A picture otherwise pins a moment down. But the door opens to a wall of garden as if to say nothing is easily navigated. You are not where you think. Portals are as unpredictable as knob and tube wiring. Scenes expose the volta, what we can only guess at or hope for, the constant drift. As spectator, I’m on my back in the ocean, all sound muffled in my ears to a vague hushed roar. Close my eyes, I’m here by the buoy. Open them, I’m down the shore by the pier. Still life is movable. Something translates desk and table, bouquets in vases, the flowers spilling over under gravity’s pull. Some say she didn’t consider her paintings art, but I bet she did. Porthole. Tomb. Door. From this to that. What is here, even when we can no longer know it with certainty, the way clouds swallow a full moon, how a simple word whispered from ear to ear soon means something else.
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Elinor Ann Walker’s poetry, flash fiction, and creative non-fiction are featured or forthcoming in Bracken, Cherry Tree, Feral, Gone Lawn, Nimrod International Journal, Northwest Review, Pidgeonholes, Plume, Ruby, The Southern Review, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. A Best Microfiction and Best of the Net nominee, she holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and prefers to write outside. Find her online at elinorannwalker.com