Spoon for Jane Freilicher
I was scribbling “Goya painted with a spoon”
when I heard Jane died (Saturn gnawed
his children without a place setting),
I knew enough not to be surprised but I was.
I never got over
the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage,
when she screamed, “I bargained too much” —
for her murdered son’s life.
The actress wore a wooden spoon as a broach.
So tongue tied, I kept “spoon.”
It is not a kind of decoration.
Jane Freilicher painted with a spoon —
potato fields, Water Mill, pink mallow,
her early painting Leda and the Swan,
nothing we see —
not with everyday palette knife,
brushes or late-invented forks,
useful for painting hydrangeas and eyelashes,
proof painters work like translators,
English into Chinese, everyday English words:
daylight, flower, woman, moon
are different in Ming, Tang, and Song:
different characters, different calligraphy.
She painted with a silver or oak spoon
ponds or stars, bones were oblongs and triangles,
nothing we see. She painted light,
mastered it, was mastered by it,
moved the world by “tipping the horizon up.”
My honor, from a distance she painted
my garden and sandspit, the house
with Corinthian columns on Mecox Bay
along the old Montauk road, the beach plums,
fireweed, roses of Sharon, day lilies, love
mostly washed out by hurricanes.
Then there was her battle of dreams
versus hallucinations, battles without a hero,
the colors of fate, breathtaking, inevitable colors.
She would never forgive
those who think painting and poetry
function about the same as wallpaper.
Sometimes she painted small pictures
easily hidden from search parties
as Goya did, hiding from the Inquisition
because he painted nudes, Protestant fields,
Catholic fields, Jewish fields, like her.
She suffered the heresies of the Hamptons
where most painters of roses,
whatever their personal faith,
and all poets, as such, are polytheists.
Again, she studied the many moods
of the sun and ocean through a window.
I studied Chinese at the Beijing railroad station,
eight thousand years or so of Chinese faces.
Every Chinese knows five cardinal relations:
ruler subject,
father son,
husband wife,
elder and younger brother,
friend and friend.
There was the undiscovered country that began
at the Southampton railroad station,
the beauty and color of Long Island
in the mist . . .
I sit shivering with the old-timers, gossiping
about the steam engines
from Pennsylvania station to Montauk
100 years ago, faster than now, the island’s
chestnut trees harvested for firewood,
the cemeteries, a little away
from the railroad tracks,
cornflowers and poppies,
off Routes 114, 27, Springs-Fireplace Road,
overloaded with painters
and their good ghosts — some comfort,
the osprey and hummingbirds.
*
Often we met at the beach, half-naked
barefooted or in sandals.
We knew where fifty-six swans nested,
why Long Island painters seldom painted
the night, or character. We chased whales,
saved wounded seals. We knew the pagan ocean
was full of surprises:
after an Atlantic hurricane, in our trees,
with salt-drenched curled leaves,
thousands of fooled monarch butterflies gathered
on their way to Mexico.
We embraced 65 years ago —
not a long time for a redwood,
a long time for an oak or an elm.
The day you died Pope Francis
said that dogs go to heaven, I wish ex cathedra,
so fawns, foxes, and rabbits aren’t left behind.
You understood shadow.
At first look, you never painted sorrow.
You picked stemless flowers, homeless
like beauties standing on street corners,
gorgeous juvenile delinquents.
Stanley Moss, who had a house in Water Mill for many years, is editor and publisher of Sheep Meadow Press. His collections of poems include “A History of Color” and “God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike.”
Jane Freilicher died on Dec. 9 at the age of 90.