Pears
by Kelly Houle
This is no graven image. Should we talk about the light? Call it a study of the disappearing edge between the secular and the sacred thing. In his 50 Secrets, Dalí wrote that the true painter must be able to patiently copy a pear while surrounded by rapine and upheaval. I confess that I love the Renaissance drape and elegant physics of the blue cloth. The sad pear I turned and turned, but I could never make it work. No artist can. It’s what the famous poet said of every pietá. Every still
life pear is the most awful.
To sketch a pear, think of two spheres, one smaller, overlapping with the first. Mother and child held within the birch frame of their invisible chapel. It’s tempting to see them as mothers-to-be, but things are not as they appear. A still life painter, by definition, is always painting the dead.
I’m thinking of the Michelangelo in St Peter’s. How every birth can resemble a death. The long approach to the end of a long suffering. The cruel implements, the way the mind labors. Formlessness rising out of form.
They carry the illusion of life. How alike they are. How different. How quickly pain dissolves into the last world. Her inhale at first sight of his body in all dimensions, both of them somehow finished and not yet started. Sculpted from a single block of stone. How smooth it polishes. How the touch of too many hands, however soft, might damage them. How any bruise to one will scar them both.
Something cords them, softens the light.
The bell that rings as they recede. The gold. How impossible he is to hold.
Kelly Houle’s poetry has appeared in CALYX, Crab Orchard Review, The Kenyon Review, Radar Poetry, Sequestrum, and many other publications. She was recently named a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the Fischer Prize, the Arts and Letters “Unclassifiable” contest, and winner of the Vivian Shipley Award from the Connecticut Poetry Society. Kelly is also a painter and Nature Journaling Ambassador for the Wild Wonder Foundation. Her paintings and handmade books are in public and private collections around the world.
Pears, Oil on linen, 4×6 inches. Click image to enlarge.