TinaniT Posted May 21, 2011 Posted May 21, 2011 I was just reading and ran across this, thought maybe I'd post here since it is "on topic." The Muse of The Actual [Lynn Knight] She'd hate if her mother were proved right-- that having her, he'd never leave his wife. We were sitting on the back deck, looking at the apple trees, that fluttered white a week ago, but now were green and plain. We blew our black tea cool while she told me the other day he'd sat where I was sitting to paint the hill, the trees, and, so she would think of him each time she looked, a bull, pawing a fallen apple in the foreground. I guess you could call it a self portrait, she laughed, and went laughing to get it from her bedroom, then propped it against the deck rail in the shade of the grape trellis so we could sit looking back and forth From the painted hill, to the actual, identical except for the bull, who did resemble him, hunched forward, restless. He does that, she said after awhile, Sort of paws around. I mean with me. She swirled her tea and sipped. Sometimes it's like he's still painting. Smudging things. His tongue Working away like a brush-- his tongue and other things. I keep thinking I should ask if he sees me as fallen. A sigh. The truth is I like being the muse. He hadn't painted for years. Now love had restored his desire. Her own desire was never so intense as in the moment he drove off again, back to the wife in Ithica. Talk about myth, she said. I stared at the bull, half expecting it to turn into him, burst from the canvas, wild with love for her and willing to forsake the world to prove it. But I knew the world was closer to her mother's version. Whatever the miracles of art, the bull would stay put, like the laws of the actual.
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