Three Landscapes

Landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures.

—Barry Lopez

I. amateur landscape, orange county fair, summer 2017

In paintings, smudges in the background sometimes seemto be workers in a field. Look closely: Is that slash of orange

bending at the waist? Does this green streak weara cap askew? Are those two smeary lines a pair of arms

outstretched? Back in your hometown your brother'sslowly dying, but here in this frame, if you squint,

that little blur of blue could be a child chasing a squirrel. Dailyyour neighbor wheels his nearly grown daughter to their van,

but this rose-colored daub in the corner could bea woman whistling on her way home after working

on a wedding quilt all afternoon with her best friendand her friend's pregnant niece. Your cousin hasn't heard

from her son in two years. So much you do not understand,just in this small scene—a splash of rare indigo, a silver figure

in the clouds. Lean in: Is this pale smear among the leaves a face,rubbed into being, or out of it, by the artist's wayward thumb?

Ii. mortlake terrace, joseph mallord william turner, 1827

On varnishing day, before Turner returnedfrom lunch, someone affixed to the parapet—just to the right and down from center—a black paper cutout of a dog.

Was it Edwin Landseer, fellow painter,who slapped last-minute canine to canvas? Orwas it Turner himself who, having remembereda child's hoop, a ladder, a doll in a chair,

had forgotten to paint a point of focusin the form of four-legged beast? It's hard now,impossible even, to imagine the paintingwithout the dog. The gaze wanders,

flits from detail to hazy detail, returningeach time to rest on the hound,the anchor of darkness out of whichthe pale green world flows.

Iii. souvenir photo, grand canyon, 1977

The difference between loneliness and solitude isthat loneliness is stapled to chaos. Eleven years old,I raise my first-ever camera to my face. My indexfinger hovers above the shutter button, whenmy father yells, Stop! Stop. You've got to haveyour sisters in the picture. I don't want peoplein the photo, I explain, but he retorts,Then you may as well just buy a postcard,as he ushers my sisters into the foreground.Trust me, he says. You'll treasure this photomore than a snapshot of just the Grand Canyon. As much as the portrait is about the subject,the landscape is about the artist, and this could not beallowed—this identifying with the enormity of absence,its geometry of echoes. Terrain like the back of the throat,the swallowed canyon, the insistent river—it's an erosional landscape, one that carries its own recordaway. I take the photo my father wants taken—my poor father,my sunburned sisters—both souvenir and evidence, a recordthey were here in summer of '77. Landscape of gravity.Of here, of now—residual of erosion. I do not knowwhere that photo is now. Why would we be an exception?