| Benton's Clouds by David Baker | ||
ORDER The Truth about Small Towns at Amazon.Com |
The background is clouds and clouds above those the color of an exhaustion, whether of field hands stacking sheaves, or the coiling, columnar exhaust of a coal engine. It is eighteen seventy in nineteen twenty-seven in nineteen ninety-eight. The colors of his clouds express each new or brooding effluence felt elsewhere as progress, no matter which foreground story, no matter the gandy dancer contoured as corn field, no matter Persephone naked as herself, as a sinew of rock ledge or oak root yet pornographic under the modern elder leering down. The background is everywhere telling. In the present moment, in the real air, what we saw above the lake was an art– gulls and then no gulls, swirl of vacation debris twirling in funnels from the pier though the wind rushed in wilder off the surge, clouds, then not clouds but a green-gray progress of violences in the lowing air, waves like a bad blow under water. We stood at the pier railing and watched it come on. It is too late to behold the future, if by future what we mean is the passed- over detail in the painting which tells where the scene is destined to lead–Benton's brilliance, beside the roiling billowy cloud banks blackened as battlefield debris, beside the shapely physique of nature on the move, its machinery of change, is history in an instant. How else infuse his Reconstruction pastorals, his dreamy midwives, sod farmers, dancing hale bales wrapped in billows of sallow light, with an agony befitting the some- time expatriate Modernist Wobby harmonica player he was. Who else could execute such a beautiful storm, whipped white, first a color on the water like a wing or natural improvement. When the Coast Guard boat swept by us waving, it was already too late and too close. The storm took down the big tree in seconds. Though we were running, swirl of muscles, bales and billows of fear like the wind breaking over each swell with the force of a hand, though we cleared the first breakwall and elm grove, it was only accident the baby's carriage was not crushed by the linden bough sheared off, clean as marrow. We were standing in the grinding rain, too soon still for tears– it was too soon to tell what damages there would be, though we knew, as in his art, as though before the last skier had tipped into the lake, there was peril ahead. We could see it all in an instant's clear likeness, where the future is not coming but is already part of the story. --reprinted from The Yale Review, 1999 ________________________________________________________________________ DAVID BAKER is author of five books of poems, most recently The Truth about Small Towns (1998, University of Arkansas Press). In early 2000 Arkansas will release his Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry, which collects more than a decade of his critical essays and reviews about recent American poetry. Baker is Professor of English at Denison University and, also, the Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. |