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56 study for acrylic of sleeman peak dusk with wildflowers Slightest wind in the pine’s apexes: the lodgepoles look to feel it more than do the firs but from inside who can say for sure? Slope-clinging prairie smoke in tight purple polyps, a few modestly bloomed Castilleja— Latin for Indian Paintbrush which struck me too ironic since I’m imagining a painting but lacking the improvisational flourish of my son, three, who asks for another canvas, butcher paper, really, before his last, Landscape with Bush, Badger, and Fence Line, is even dry— inlaid with several parchment-dry irises folding pulselessly into themselves, all amidst a wave of balsamroot climbing horizon-ward like meerschaum retreating (who doesn’t tire of grandness? Gilbert: I don’t believe in modesty in the arts) with all the shoreline’s light. Some of the boy’s sweet arrogance here, please, his shrug at an uncle’s compliment: Oh that, that’s an airplane but I don’t like it so much: the old botanist’s indifference that the bloom was named for him: I’m dying in Spain and they dishonor a wildflower with my name! Their desire: a vanishing point into which most properly the painter disappears, impalpably as the elucidating if not incriminating dusk. ...

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