Nineteenth-Century Canvasses

                             Hinsdale Bridge, September 2014

 

Constricted by their clothes but unencumbered

by irony, they went to big places

and painted what they saw, what they’d come

to see — the long picture vistas, the face

of God and America, real estate.

And they worked big back then — chest-thumping mountains,

laudanum skies, the beckoning gates

of everything we didn’t know we wanted.

They taught me to see this valley, tonight,

the Connecticut. What natural law

were they arguing, what hazards of light?

Cole, Bierstadt, Moran — maestros of awe.

If paint could sing, those canvasses would sing

arias. But this — it’s not like anything.

 

 

© Michael Fleming

Brattleboro, Vermont

September 2014

 

(Appeared in Atlanta Review 23:1)

 

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