Remember when we went to the gallery
and found the landscape? You said the piece was little more than
primordial bits, shapes, lines, surfacing from chaos, like fragments
of us. I suggested it was integrated, balanced, and far more ordered
than confused. We placed it over the mantle. Now, in the divorce, we
each grapple for ownership of it, the pictified essence of
incompatible temperaments.
The year she stopped eating and working and talking, she devolved, draping cloth over mirrors, not brushing her teeth. She went from Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath to Anne Sexton, reading their work over and over, copying their words. A day came. She reached for a pencil... cracked egg, hot griddle. Her first poem filled two pages. She now eats oatmeal and wanton soup from the Chinese restaurant.