Still, Dead, Silent

Our daughter noticed first. The bee that came in a wavering, looping path through the front door and up the stairs, into the stifling room, and then at last, to the lilacs. She had pointed it out to me when it came into the gallery and kept her finger on it until it reached the painting, the lilacs. Then she laughed as the bee bumbled around the deep purple. The fat thing would back up to take another run at the uncooperative flowers, hit the canvas, and bounce back, then hum around again for a bit, before trying a different angle. This went on long enough so that our daughter managed to drag a few adults away to come and see. She dragged them from their wine and conversations, their hands mysteriously flapping and floating, arcing and diving.

When Rob came to see, we both looked at each other and said Zeuxis! as if it were a secret password. Zeuxis, as every student of art history learns, was the revered realist painter of antiquity. Birds flew down to eat the grapes from his painted vine. My heart was caught high and folded up in my throat. The bee must be a good omen of some sort. It was a mysterious moment, touching and silly. Then the winged creature managed to fly straight out the door, leaving us to wonder if it had all been a vision. I wanted to drench the moment in meaning, but then, no, I just let it drop. I too took a perspiring glass of cold wine and sipped, let my hands move toward whatever I was speaking about, joining in creating the invisible knotwork of gestures that afternoon.

It was a lovely day, this day of the bee who fell in love with my husband's lilacs, which is what Chloe said to draw the small crowd toward her-look, the bee is in love with my dad's painting. All but a couple of the paintings had sold. Which, in fact, meant everything. A return to the calm that comes when bills are paid and doubt has been sent its creeping way once again, as it always is, and always needs to be. A return to the table that sits in the middle of our small family and fills with odd objects: bowls of apples and nectarines, jars of lilacs, dahlias, delphinium, whatever is in season. The pleasing muddle of all this, the holy sojourn of light soaking these common things, casting shadows, some stark and deep, others mutilated and wild.

After a show, we all return to the proper rhythm of days, which has somehow left us in the weeks and months before. The paintings are a way of marking time, usually two paintings to a month, or not quite two. And then I fit my poetry into that scrim of time and all is well. At lunch, Rob comes up from his studio in the basement, and we eat bread and cheese and pears cut up and talk about what he's been working on for the past several hours.

He works from photographs taken during elaborate, long, mind-bending sessions. The table he sets up near the window, under skylights, on a sunny day. It's the scene of a great battle, and he is the weak god, the momentary god, presiding over. To set up a vase of flowers, a couple of nectarines, and a bowl of cherries in front of a white drape takes great force and energy. Hundreds of infinitesimal adjustments, the heat of the sun beating down, flower petals dropping. Every leaf must be arranged so the sun strikes it a certain way. A cloud floats in from nowhere. He waits. These sessions are a workout. He moves into and back from the tableau, adjusting and readjusting, holding the camera perfectly still while the clouds scud by. He's breathing hard. Afterwards his muscles are sore, and he drinks glass after glass of water.

I ignore him completely while he takes his photos. I walk by occasionally and set down a book or an object from my study...