Darele Bisquerra

I know now, why she had to paint

Alone in a woodhouse

Rural silence, rough road

Only he drove

Felines came close for milk and warmth tuned to her piercing whistle

As the water pump was primed with nephew’s strong arms I’d drink from the blue enamel cup

The stone well splashed fullness

Catfish carp bit hard when cousins fished

We pulled their barbed beard spikes, bloodied

Dark olive lagoon stayed sheened through firm rowboat oar-pushes

where duck decoys float

She’d put on the flame, a dented aluminum kettle full of rainwater or melted snow when the well was fickle

pluck sharp quills from freshshot pheasants then boil their parts fervently

As the glorylight cut across the dust her arms swept the pocked linoleum

opened the coiled porch door to throw dry bread to the birds

Then a turn to the stairs to the oil room above

Gleaming wet canvases leaned, shiny against the cracked plaster wall - On the cloth-covered heavy tables - pine frames with slats & curves waited for their turn to be filled - She checked the stiff bristle brush that soaked in turps overnight - Did the cerulean blue wash away? The stained turpentine was intoxicating - Did the glass pane hold still the living, squirming, creamy pigments? She sliced with the loaded palette knife on the clean canvas linen - Reality was perforated and fantasy spread like butter

I know now, why she had to paint

Pointillistic trees in brilliant hues

realized the drab forms of the present

She made the winter spring

Five grown children respected & oooh-aaahed

on Sunday afternoons

but choked quiet in Monday’s flood of anxieties

We grandchildren burned our memories deeply, giggly scarred

with hot color dreams

Maybe a butterscotch landscape today

Usually a teal river, often caramel mountains with burnt sienna furrows

Chromatic candyland trees, sometimes carved violet rocks

but always, always

A white wooden house in the middle of vast, vast acres of land

Grandpa bought the acres, she lived its solace

Dank gray, verdant suppleness or death gold by turns of the moon

It soothed the survival of World War 1, the Depression and a grandson lost to polio

Immersed in the vacant wildness

She tasted it, surrendered to it in part -

his public, his purchase, his projects

The earthen landscape, the branched container -

So her private language became

a rosepink palette

She saw it, walked it, tended it

Birthed strawberries from that acreage

But did not escape it

A cautious paradise —

She had to paint it, capture it, swirl it, juggle it,

cut it, soak it & tack it on a linen square

to trap it in her flat cloth cage

before it swallowed her as dust

To conceive is to reach

To perceive is to conquer, contain & transfix

Her landscapes were her language

from her vantage

to stretch, survive & breathe

I know now, why she had to paint