(For Elizabeth Keenan)

The clock on my wall marches forward
measuring each stingy second against another,
as if they are objects to be moved.
The painting it faces offers a more generous view:
surf crashing on rock,
white blue-gray water leaping
the wet charcoal-green stone.
It is early or late in the day,
when the line between sky and ocean
fades into a pearled surface
brushed over the straw sun, or moon.

Behind this glow
she covers every subject in painted light,
leaving her clear vision in the frame
so I can fill it with the objects I remember
from long summers on the Maine coast.

In it I find sparkling scale-stained fish houses,
ruined piers, mossy, stacked with lobster pots,
oily working docks. The masts, rigging, sails,
now turned to engines, winches, cable,
even the nets have changed knots in the diffusion.

There are small patches, blue sky meets dark water,
here nature would teem, gulls and crabs,
fish and seals, all beneath the blued-darkness.
Even the clocks are under the surface.

This artist has cast a translucent net
over the sharp edges of her coastal life.
With a palette of white, yellow, gray-blue light
she allows the canvas to become an open world,
her brushed strokes, timeless, swarming and still,
where every object she did not paint
is a subject in the light she did.