Zarin, "Heirloom"

"Take it," my grandmother said. "You
    might as well have it now."
"No," I said, knowing what now meant.
    But I took it anyway, when
I left, leaving a white space--
    a window where the picture went.

I brought it home and hung it up:
    my grandmother, young, reading
under some trees. Red dress and shoes,
    the same rooster red used, for
effect, on a rooftop skirting
    a broad, heavy sky of news-

paper gray, her wide book a pair
    of white goose wings, shedding
light on her face. What is happening
    in those pages? She doesn't
look up, there's no hint of the artist,
    my grandfather, dampening

his brushes a few yards away,
    about as far as I sit
from her now, although to me,
    at this distance, she's a good
deal smaller--a painted figure
    in a painting. A tree

is a waterspout, a peaked roof
    is a bird, a frill of roses verges
on a lilac hedge. And the orangerie
    in back--a fantasy? A hotel?
He's painted the frame the exact shade
    of the sky, wet streaks of greeny-

gray, as though if he just pushed out
    the margin far enough, the packed
clouds might hold off forever. But
    when the storm starts, won't they pack
up, go in? Barbed lightning might hurl
    tridents on the uncut

   

lawn; my grandfather would have
closed his easel, my grandmother
her book. Or did she read on, staying
    in the rain until the last
words of the chapter, a phrase so
    long, it unwinds here, a fraying

wire that holds up a second picture
    painted by the same hand,
fluent, now, on a matching square
    of bristol board. It's late in the day.
Across a green smear of fields
    a river swells to an inlet where

two children, poles taut in their hands,
    are fishing. The boy is my father,
the girl, my aunt. On the surface
    of the water the painter has drawn
himself in as a shadow, but what
    he sees, we see: the open field

suffused with sun, the runnels stoked
    with darkness, the boy's smoke-swirl
of hair; twilight, the day receding,
    the girl's red dress an old one
cut down, as if this was the story
    my grandmother is so endlessly reading.


Cynthia Zarin

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