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Of Cos Cob in Snow
- Wesleyan University Press
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194 gArnet poems Of Cos Cob in Snow A December mist lifting from snow, the tree trunks soaked to umber, splatters, here and there, of russet beech leaves, lichen grey-green, grey-white snow— the kind of morning Twachtman liked to paint. I can step out my door and walk in it, making black prints of boot in the melt, marking the swizzle lines of weeping cherry, fan-like sprays of blue spruce. I crave a Japanese sense of the delicate whole, mad as a monk for the snowcapped heights of Fujiyama, the lower mountain suspended in cloud, save for three storks cutting a diagonal path. A swatch, a swipe, a drag of the dry brush, impasto next to the bleed-through weave of linen. An old wall drifts left and right, dips and rises, wears a ribbon of lacy ice. How did the painter keep his hands from freezing as he plodded around Round Hill, worked the easel into the muck beside Horseneck Brook? Can gloved hands handle the brush? Americans, it was claimed, “were formulating an impressionism minus its violence, force, and ‘virile power.’” Well enough. It’s true. Here, in Twachtman, is the pliant, the vague, the vacuous release, as if the very breath of the year were expiring in haze, yet how tender it looks, a place to be lost in and buoyed by, the New England pastoral the Pilgrims dreamt of. We take it for the save-yourself virtues of the illumined large in a tonal range that whispers peace. Cos Cob in snow more than a century ago, marked by the ever-patient force that waits to move through us again, caught as the ghost of something else. ...