An angler slashed on in black
is crouched in a chaos
of daisies and mulleins, on a riverbank,
from beyond the high edge of which blooms
an apple orchard that demonstrates
signs of human labor, a rake
against a tree, a basket. The picture employs
a sunny landscape, though its flowery background
is considerably faded, and because
of the thickness and rapidity
of its application, the paint
of the face is badly cracked, as are
coat and hands,
though only the crazing
of the face at first concerns
us (later the rest). And somehow a continuity
of this landscape, a cypress
erupts, black against a world
in which all the light
is white, and each color
merely an exclusion
of white, orchard and cypress glowing
beneath a petrifact white body neither sun
nor moon – and then occurs
an extrusion of breech
and sycamore, and from this forest
issue the first rapids of the river,
the angler, preparing
in an exhilaration
of fear and foreknowledge
of consequence, to cast,
though discovering it difficult to see
through these shifting perspectives
of watery light in which the light
devours color
and shadow. The angler –
the focus of all this rather
than a subordinate element,
who knows how it is done,
but not how it comes out –
crouches at the tail of the pool,
while above him from a black
discontinuity of the earth, the source
pours over the radiant first
of its chalky falls.
-for Nick Lyons