As Thoughts Fly, by Deborah DeWit
I Try to Imagine What Deborah DeWit Might Paint Next
by Lana Hechtman Ayers
after Patricia Fargnoli’s “Hopper’s Paintings”
for Deborah DeWit
The paintings of DeWit’s I like best are filled with books and papers,
letters written in longhand, light more shadowy than light,
even impossible true things like crows flying inside and outside
the window frame simultaneously, the way I am sometimes inside
and outside time–at the same moment, here with you in an office
with the drone of a fan thumping back and forth, but also
in a room many years ago with windows thrown open to the sea,
steady thrum of waves a mantra as lost to me as departed beloveds
I’ll never see again, nothing promised in this life, not peace,
nor snow falling over the beach, nor swimming with a pod of Orcas.
When I look into DeWit’s canvas I touch letters from abroad
sent to me from friends I’ve never met, read billets-doux I haven’t
received yet, envy the black cat near the top left corner heading out
into the brightness of the future, realize the possibility that while
I still hold these last few breaths, leaden though they may be,
perhaps I too can fall upward into the sky, an upside-down crow,
or become a lamplit being in the no time of yesterday and tomorrow
that is outside the bounds of now–and oh, how I adore DeWit’s cups
filled with tea or coffee or something warm I once swallowed
into my life, like love that I could drink deeply of to become whole.
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