Rising
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The Poem
Rising
I stood in the rain for three hours to feel her presence.Not with the paintings, not with the broken spine —with the rain. With the line.With the wanting badly enough to stand in the wet and waitand finally enter the blue housewhere she left everything as if she’d just gone for coffeeand would be back in a momentand the moment has been going on since 1954.
The brushes are still there.The mirror above the bedwhere she painted herself looking at herselfis still there.I stood in it and saw what she saw —a person in a bodythat had its opinions about what a person could do.The person painting anyway.
She sits in the cool water.The water rising through the cracked floor —the tiled prison of a bodythat required this much documentationjust to prove it existed on its own terms.She sits in it the way you sitin the thing that could take you if you let it.She doesn’t let it.She is a pillar. The water rises. She does not move.
Cool water rising
The nails.Not suffering for its own sake —the honest document of what it coststo hold yourself together from the outsidewhen the inside has been rearrangedby forces you did not choose.She painted every nail. Every cost.The corset, the spine,the crack down the middle the world would have preferred she hide.She did not hide it.She held it up in the gold light of a womanwho decided the wound is also the workand the work is also the lifeand the life will be told on her terms or not at all.
The spine —gold and exposed,running through her like the thingthat was supposed to be the broken partand became the most beautiful part.The gold in the crack is not apology. It is argument.She broke. She put herself back together.She kept painting.Right until the end.
Gold and exposed
The flowers.Always the flowers —not instead of the pain, not in spite of it,but with it, alongside it,the beauty and the nails in the same framebecause that is what a life looks like from the inside —the breaking and the blooming not sequential but simultaneous.
I relate to her personally.The blue house feels like she’s just getting coffee in the next room.I stood in the rain to feel the presenceof someone who was broken and painted anyway,who was told by the body, by the world,by the man she kept loving —you cannotand who picked up the brush and saidwatch me.
This is the homage.Not to the suffering. To the painting anyway.To the rising — not after the breaking but through it,spine gold, flowers crowning, cool water rising,the cracked floor letting the water inwhich is also the cracked life letting the light in —
A person in a body that had its opinions.
Rising anyway.