I am watching the lonely goatherd—that is, the two garbage canisters at the end of the lawn. To the left in my window-sized view are two mini-cypresses (I don’t know their true names), then a small strip of road before the hill behind it rises, a long patch of grass until a cream-colored ranch house sits on a crest looking deserted in the early evening summer sun. I could look at this view for many minutes and even many hours and I could replay my entire life in this unfamiliar though truly too familiar landscape. On the drive here I started to talk about my father—how he bought two motorcycles in my youth, but barely rode them and used them for showing off that he could buy things, just as his father accumulated autos, compressors, tools (Sears Craftsman), furniture, leather coats, good shoes, and mounds of bound notebooks—lined and unlined. An entire trajectory of items all leading to the same conclusion: Things were the soul of those distant days—not emotions, not people (really); our lives revolved around what we had, not what we couldn’t see—the ocular proof—that robust, but weak, hackneyed phrase of Othello’s (oh, I forgot dictionaries and the Greatest Books Series, bound, from rummage sales).

I return to the window and at the top a broken branch hangs down into the view. It’s an oak, or something smaller than an oak (that ranch house is now half-relieved of the sunshine it used to have). Did I tell you I am sometimes afraid of my thoughts? Not the view, but simple thoughts. That of the end. The life ending—the blood running to a whisper—I’ve been half in love with easeful death…ain’t that a kicker?, and Keats would go before thirty…in Rome—what a place to perish. Did he see any paintings or architecture? What happened as he had his final views? We are often grasping after distant tracts that are so far away from us. It’s easy to imagine Keats as a stand-in, but we also have his poetry, his poetic thought enmeshing with our imagination, lighting the citadel of the brain…dementia (the word) not even coined on that fully fateful day in February 1821. And a few months ago I did read a book on Keats’s Odes so I’m again half in love with easeful Keats. But my mother and father? I’ve wondered about friends who lost a parent early and how…together they seem now. Time passes and they are no worse—maybe strengthened, maybe pliable? They walk about not with a chip on their shoulder but a belt, celebrating their seeming wholeness that wraps around their power center in more ways than one, since I’m speaking mainly of women. Women who lose a mom or dad, but what do they gain? I’d like to know, since I still have the picture of my mother’s last moment—a bad-reception FaceTime call in the nauseating lights of a hospital—that I would like to trade for their blurred memories so far from them now. Thirty-five years in the dustbin of history, a history I no more recognize as my own, and so a slurred toast: To all my friends… We’ve all had parents come and go, appear and then disappear—what is this but the famous stuff of life?

The view now has a lawnmower crisscrossing the window, last cleaned I don’t know when…and I think that life is never as kind as we make out, that is why we suffer so much…we think we need somebody to say something or to show us respect…it’s so easy to be close to complete calm without these monstrosities that we etch in Goya nightmare pen and pencil for minutes upon hours. But see that hatted man on the lawnmower doing his duty in this landscape of calm? When it’s as easy as shearing such a wide plain of grass there is a little more than hope. A lump under the armpit? Look at that hill—wondrously sheared, ready for the nothing that occurs on it for years except its grass being cut and a few dustings of snow. The earth is ready to accept its King again—that is the earth itself, which regulates everything: our moon moods and the cries of the blue jays and the broken basketball hoop whose first players grew up and moved on, never to return to childhood. 

You see I have to take a certain shine off of elegy—and this is not one, or a self-portrait. I’m in my view so as to continually pass the estates that have been built up over a lifetime of complaining and often taking the short way to love. I and my view. Perception. Coming back to people after too many knuckled hours in books…and…it’s amazing to think I had two parents and they are now dead, in the shadow world, and maybe watching me continue to flail: look at bodies on the computer screen and eat too many tortilla chips, while trying to find signification in my eerie views and many other sorts of impoverishments in too advanced a degree. Continuing down a road that they had already seen me familiarize myself with. 

There is a man appearing and disappearing over that field of grass now, a field that was a landscape of calm but now is something else—the decor has changed though the stage is still the same. The man appearing and disappearing has blond hair and a dark suit jacket. He’s dead in real life, but his most fun film lives on—a portrait of the “swinging sixties” by Antonioni. Though there is no mention of his parents. “Some people are politicians, I’m a photographer…” Why summon such art into life via another art? The elegiac confession goes back many years. This actor, somewhat negligible, is now one of my stronger connections to my mother, even though we didn’t watch this film together, though possibly we did and I’m forgetting, and just at that moment that I could remember I choose some different ruined estate—the pressured years, the blistered childhood…a bee flying into a hole in my pants during a baseball game and my embarrassed anxiety…of course I’m an anxious person, I have a nerve-disorder in my eye …possibly stemming from this aged-nine incident. A bee still remains in my pants, along with David Hemmings at twenty-five. I have blocked out years of our relationship, for when I left her city, I left her heart and began to bewitchingly renew my own. There are rivers, rills, and streams separating these estates—how can the body not ape the earth that gave birth to it? Once I elope with one memory I will graze on the bank and examine the silty flow for the next to be picked out. Always there is French summer sun on these streams, maybe Poussinian sun, birthed in the Roman skies, though his body came to life in Les Andelys, spread-eagle with meaning? Or should I say egalitarian meaning?

Though I’m still sitting on the couch with the view of the hill, morning has now taken over for the sunset that once flourished. A day has not passed or reversed to the beginning, it is morning light—still summer as in the estates up top. It’s important to confess that I don’t have a present to speak of—the present is simply the tide wrack of memories from the past and one can adjust. The weather as in a painting, like Poussin fudging around with Landscape of a Man Killed by a Snake: his landscape, his eternal present, something thunderstruck and made up of nature that overwhelmed his time—nature and its changeable light in the Baroque era.

There is no more inhabiting for me, though I’m healthy. The body is here—and it’s happy to be alive, maybe more happy that the present does not exist. Meals are not at issue. There might be a pack of gum and a water bottle, but little else except the view, now in morning, with vapor rising after the cooled night or what I can only describe as “the cooled night” though it is something else, something beyond lonesome, though thoroughly ordinary. Mist and vapor…and I remember some lines of Moby-Dick, a book I must have read when I still Held on to a present, had a mother, and kept up with the box scores…the vapor of certain spouts by a whale. Again the lines of art lead to and then out of my view—the visual intoxication to allow the estates to keep shifting memory and memories, handing them off like relay teams, but not in an effort to pollute or even to understand. Confession is beyond confession. There isn’t someone to tell “this” to, because of the present’s bedevilment. The purpose isn’t dark or light, but I have to do this, though nothing will happen to me…anymore.

The theory in an unpopular book by a French art critic is that the opened expanse of a painting is a stage which leads out to Nature and Human Action, with the former connected to decor (engagement and places) and the later pegged to actors. In my view, the grass is the stage and  the decor is placed on top of the surrounding of the stage: the ranch house, the hill, the lawnmower previously seen. The decor of the past keeps bubbling over, trying to make its mark or at least an appearance. I was often in these cycling estates that host henpecked time, I was often reading in too dim light or looking at a lover and deciding how I would be able to negotiate for what I would want because I wanted control more than anything, but I didn’t know that then, I simply thought I wasn’t that selfish, that I did some things for people I liked, avoided those I didn’t, and pursued people but often used backhanded comments in face-to-face dialogue to destroy the hopes of a relationship with either man or woman.  I couldn’t give much and I had to separate myself to recharge, to be able to give anything—they understood, right? The men were bored and the women wanted to make love and one kneeled on the bed, slapped her ass, and demanded I elongate myself fundamentwise, but I didn’t want to do what was demanded and for that sissified attitude I suffered—not the other way, though I might have thought they would suffer because I wouldn’t give all of myself. I suffered, while retaining control, I suffered enormously, so much so that I covered that pain into phantoms by eating (my being addicted to food), by watching movies that wouldn’t help me live or die (though some did). And where did this Beelzebub behavior come from? Where did I get schooled in such ill and ick? From someone who didn’t know what she was up to, from someone who refused to look inside and accustom herself to the contemplative life because the self-help gurus counseled her that she was the victim—her husband, her mother, her siblings, even her children were holding her back and making her suffer, and she would be goddamned if she would let people take advantage of her again. I realize that in writing in this grandiose manner of confession, I am trying to turn the reader against her and see how involved she was in my suffering—me, the one still living…and continually suffering, though I am not in the present, but in a breakout room of sorts containing changeable decor, attempting to fell the pain—pictures appearing like knobby growths on my body. The tableaux is shifting ever so slightly…away from her, but also away from me…those here are still memories and if mine, I’m dictating how other people have been seen by me and I use my bias to color the pictures or drain them of color, as the cell-phone camera I’ve become. 

The view is coming back—the grass is greener—and I recognize the person who sued to be me in his present—how he would try to write something and think highly of it, but as he wrote it he thought of further adulation or future breasts he could lick, or what things (mostly subjects) he would need to keep avoiding. His mother and father, his ex-wife, his son—he’d gotten married too early. He didn’t know his art, let alone himself. If he could be in that distant field and look back at the window he was now behind. No, this is not the present. The house lights dim and he sees that man struggling to write, though the future calls—seas, mountains, and other stone features—all these the most unsympathetic and sympathetic to his travails. That is present. One could say the confession is the view and not the words. What is left is view, and what was once the words describing the memories and the estates. He can’t feel the chair he is sitting on because his hands are gone, as well as his readymade behaviors.

The hill view now has silver-tipped cloud banks floating into the horizon line. Midmorning? Midafternoon? Will the decor change? In another life this all came from a part-time fascination with the French painter Poussin, including voluminous sources but not in-person visits because museums scared him—how could he enter these sanctums by himself and though his mother loved her Toulouse-Lautrec and the mildly forgotten John Huston film, she didn’t strive to cross into their spaces either; if she did (and I’m grasping) she would be putting herself in an inferior position and she couldn’t live with that anymore. In interstices of the distant view, I notice another flared tree on the hill next to the ranch house…imagine telling Poussin that some of his background villas and citadels now look like ranch houses. And then describing ranch dressing to him…? That man writing has often tried to grasp for humor to make up for other things. Jokes? I don’t think this is funny, his (my) mother would say. But you introduced me to his films, all those… No, I didn’t. You did. In fact, this is the movie you loved so much, the one we’re watching now. A good therapist would kick me in the ass now: And what have you contributed to the dissolution of this relationship? There is no dissolution, it was dissolved from the start. Now you are trying to joke your way—I’m not, we were hardly ever happy. My ex-wife knew me better than you and she said, You’re always avoiding something but that something is your surrender to salvation. When she said that, I knew I couldn’t get anything past her and I had to leave…by the way, this is our last session, I’m getting a new therapist.

Clouds over aqua blue like they’ve been badly spray-painted across the sky. I’m breathing in clear, cool air even if this is not the present of my life, yet how could there be this nightside when I’m on earth…even if I die, the soul careens about this planet—or do we just assume that?

To the side of the view I’m learning how to see outside it, in a tree, by an algae-topped pond, its frenetic leaves in a different sunshine than those of the view before me, the stippling like in the middle distance of Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm. Am I reading that correctly? That four-hundred-year-old tree deposited not only by my imagination, but also by the delicacies of soil, of rolled earth, of Roman ground popping up in the Hudson Valley, though it often represents the ancient world in Poussin. Who am I exactly confessing this to, this scrambled information about a painter, whose name is often pronounced incorrectly? Getting your bearings, are yah? Yes, this it is…or are my bearings getting me? But…that tree, hanging over the lime-green bog…give me another metaphor, give me great Glaucus before Jason came to town? I want to walk over to the tree, out of the view and into that presence, but as I don’t have hands or arms (I do have legs) I can’t sit up though eyes there are. Something calls itself “not right” in one of my estates and the flow becomes a trickle. A wind chime behind me, yet no neck capabilities…only eyes sidelining to the new viewpoint, growing old in the only time I know how to count by. 

It was in the Hudson Valley that I learned of my mother’s demise—at home when the call came about my father. I’m on the porch of a house following a Zoom call the day before. My brother bore the news both times and only with my mother’s call did I hear many birds and crickets…July heat. Again, I’m stacking things, emplacing them so my brother, ex-wife, and child could see me as the victim, as the person it all happened to. You’re simply selfish, my brother said once and I kept silent with his truth balanced on my shoulders. I wanted to say, You have to be selfish to live on this earth…and in a sense, I did say it, as it arose from my stream like a creature slowly rising from dark waters into the sights of those lucky enough to be present. I had all these types of responses ready, arrows in my quiver. Keep me safe, but keep me apart…this was how I could win the day and night, going to bed in control, pouring a dull, gray, retrograde substance over the thing I called love, so it remained nonworking to all comers. Simply selfish eyes, but also…love yourself in the art, not the art in yourself. And if I got old enough, which I did…give me…Poussin. After the dead have died, then something else begins, you live in a Louise Glück poem, even if you don’t know them…art is always there. With a single stroke, it multiplies endlessly the history of all strokes. Art is but an immense tradition of the invention of the arts, of the birth of the endless forms of knowledge. You are in sunshine or cloud grime, you are there, but are you present in that there? Shapes and colors, apperception, optics…the silence of nature. That tree, those two garbage bins, no more calamity, tumult, or troubled toil. Are their spaces left for gestures? This gesture toward the tree at the edge of the pond—it is gesture…toward the present, the breathing present, where I might conceive a greater strangeness so I can slip off the bank of my estates and travel by simple gestures. It is difficult being because the shroud of the initial view still threatens. If I kept to the hill, the ranch house, the mower, and the sunlight best on display over things I’ve looked on for so long, then I wouldn’t have to apply myself to the pain in the tree to the left, the wind chime behind me, the filigree of an ancient painter. How could it be painful to see something new? To open one’s eyes and see what is before them, even if a touch askew? It is our wont to miss things, to not fully perceive. Not only the design in a Poussin painting or the lump near the armpit that becomes something quite terrifying, but the good a person has done in their life can’t fully be diminished by the bad.

The view is beginning to disappear. The sky fills with cumulus clouds. An evening, a distant evening: my son and his friend played basketball and I watched them like I’d never watched anyone in my life. They lived inside my viewing, the view of them was as of me without self—I was these two boys rushing about and heaving with excitement…not living vicariously, but living. I shoved off a different shoal, though I stood still sitting. In my one life to live they lived with me, not in the incessant hours of love but in a unique triplicate. Love removed from love which leaves love, but only a wrong-way love from what I was used to. You give all and when you are tired and can’t do anything, you give more—that is living. No comfort, only giving. And if one gives in this way there won’t be room for resentment. Really? This is why we often only give to our children this way. (Poussin never had children, only venereal diseases). The bounce of that basketball on gravel with small spouts of dirt rising…and I didn’t hear tinnitus…I don’t know if I ever had it for brief moments, seconds that were minutes, tumbling time of no-time. We are already there, the wise man said.

The crows and the evening birds. A long-winged carpenter wasp on the outside table as the confession continues. The Allen-wrench holes on this table are beautiful, pendants of a sort. Etchings below the marks of confession, as the wasp scrapes small strips off the weatherbeaten… This wasp—all the way from my childhood…to appear in my dying days. I’m watching calmly now—not afraid it will hurt me, but I was afraid till just a minute ago. One small step for… And, Henry James on his deathbed: Here it is at last, the distinguished thing. That long tree to the right indicating a type of jaundiced pain between its sundowning leaves. Is there a wasp nest there? I can see death in those rays and it is frightening, a knife triumphantly entering flesh— But even there I am mistaken—the cliched metaphors I’d used to push away the unmentionables, the uninhabitable. “Little soul little stray little drifter now where will you stay all pale and all alone after the way you used to make fun of things.” We make fun of things, except those Buddha figures, making fun even on the inside where no one can see the molten cruelty of our intentions. The distinguished thing? But he loved the art in himself, not himself in the art, and I’ve been accused of the latter by myself and others. If it is true it gave me a way out or it created a path to jump out of the way of that charging train that never relents. But false worship, false love…my son asking me to play basketball with him: But, honey, I will see myself better if I watch you, just as I enjoy my view… Where is this taking place? To the left of the hill. If I participate I’ll fold up and fold over…but experience is art. I coil up and begin to participate. I bounce the ball and move with motion quick. I’m doing things I haven’t done since my twenties. The thought of death is kept very far, not just at bay. In this I am now my own view, the self viewing—this other that is the self’s strange sister or double. That is the present—playing basketball, though it’s already years later. The present continues on, calories keep getting burned off—even if I can account for only the view and the inhuman objects to the left and right of the view. Only in the present do I love my eyes and legs. And only in the present am I even close to happiness. That is the present—the pain is the past, living on the estates of the mind. The present is the world of life and death—the past isn’t.