Invisible Art, by Laura Glenn
I loved the way she captured light in glass,
and so I asked, Could we paint together?
We set up bottles: medicine brown, emerald, a milky cobalt, palest aqua, transparent.
I wanted lessons: Paint, was all she said.
We worked in silence: the white noise of the refrigerator,
the dip and swish of brushes in water jars.
Side by side we turned watercolors to liquid glass,
spilled tinctures that dried to grainy shadows.
I captured a tiny spider inside the brown bottle
with a fine-point bristle; she caught the interplay
of dark and light—a bright chiaroscuro;
we both gleamed the shoulders of bottles
letting unpainted paper show through.
Decades later, in her eighties,
she cleaned out her house of fifty years,
and looking back, departed.
A few of her paintings hung on walls;
most stayed in a windowless attic.
At the retirement community, she refused to paint—
suddenly art was too messy, the activities room
beneath her. Bored, she filled her empty days
with nothing.
I brought in watercolor pencils she wouldn’t touch,
though she watched me wet and slide them on the paper,
and advised: More vibrant colors.
I let her choose.
In her nineties, she succumbed:
in the activities room a coloring book drew her in.
Poignantly she shaded the spaces between black outlines
in masterful gradations of crimson and mauve.
Soon she was painting on her own again—her spectrum a fan reopening.
Gremlins hid in tight-knit designs, so different
from her past works―realistic, abstract, sumi, then back to realism.
At ninety-five, when her heart wasn’t in it, sometimes
I’d hand her paper and paints.
She’d dip a clean brush into water—deftly touch it
to the white paper a few times,
and proclaim: There, it’s done!
Laura Glenn is the author of I Can’t Say I’m Lost (FootHills) and When the Ice Melts (Finishing Line); her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. Also a visual artist, she lives in Ithaca, NY and works as a freelance editor. https://www.lauraglennpoetandartist.com/