“It had become a glimmering girl/With apple blossom in her hair” (Yeats)

But something rustled on the floor,  
And someone called me by my name:  
It had become a glimmering girl  
With apple blossom in her hair  
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Last year I wrote a long essay about the past, about an artist who painted me and was more than a little obsessed with me. Writing this was prompted by a couple of things: I was sorting through a tall stack of the artist’s letters to me; and I wanted to find a way to truly think about that period by engaging a portrait of me that hangs in the stairwell leading from my bedroom to the first floor of our house. I walk up and down those stairs multiple times a day. The painting has been hanging there since 1993 when the painter brought to us as a gift to our daughter, who will perhaps one day want this in her home. (Not yet…)  Last summer a friend helped me take it out of its frame (it had kind of been cobbled into a frame and I’d always meant to frame it properly) and because he is an artist, I asked him about the pigments and the composition. I’d pretty much finished writing the essay months earlier but his analysis allowed me to add a section which in turn helped me to understand something about the artist’s process.

This essay is out on submission right now and to be honest, I wonder if anyone will want to publish it. It’s personal. Does anyone really want to know about that stuff? How I was courted and manipulated? How I was a surrogate in some ways for the artist’s real love, his daughter? But I found things out and I also found a solace in talking to this younger self and listening to her side of the story. Which of course is my story too but for years I kept it (her) at a distance, Oh, that old thing, it doesn’t have anything to do with me now. Except it did. I have his side of the story, detailed in the stack of letters, as well as the three volumes (sketchbooks!) of formal declarations of his love and need.

Yesterday I was working in my garden, planting some seeds, tidying the greenhouse, lugging pots of lilies to the various decks for summer pleasure. At one point I stopped in my tracks because the little Merton Beauty apple tree in the vegetable garden was loud with bees. It had become unshapely with the years and John pruned it carefully this year, looking at the shape of the branches in air, as structure, as potential bearers of fruit. We wondered if that would set back its blooms and fruit but it has loads of flowers and the bees were visiting each one. It’s been given a new life, the tree, and in some ways I feel as though I was given something too in my work to understand the young woman in the stairwell, now cleaned and reframed. That time of my life has been reframed, in a way. There was so much I took for granted, so much I was willing to turn away from, to deny. And now I have been pruned of those illusions.

I see the haste of this work, the urge to put the young poet down on canvas, the firm line of the right part of my head. I see how he would have sketched with a brush dipped in black, a line here, and here, and here. My friend shows how the eyes are not symmetrical and they are the eyes I see in the mirror every day, not symmetrical, but these are not looking at me, not directly; they are implicating me in something I am only now discovering.

A day later, this morning, I come down the stairs early and look up to the blank wall. A small hook to hold the wire at the back of the frame, which has been dismantled, the painting resting flat in a safe place. Everything has been taken apart, dusted, looked at closely. I have talked and talked and talked. A blank wall, and somehow I don’t know where to look, whose eyes to meet. A line here, and here, and here, and on the face I see in the mirror, a line here, and here, and here.

Note: the lines of poetry at the beginning of the post are from “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by W.B. Yeats. The passages in conclusion are from my essay, “Let A Body Venture At Last Out of its Shelter”.