Chas Codman, Minor Landscape Painter

1.
The lack of glazes that might have deepened
lake scenes or the pearly tinges of his clouds
more suitable to South Seas than New England,
like whorls in the ear of a woman in Fragonard
her skin nothing but pink, alabaster, and butter.
The brace of women, one twirling a parasol --
repeat in paintings for public places and estates --
then tiny sloops confront identical directions
whether painted on canvas or wood.
2.
The boulders transparent as clouds behind them
Figures who camp on river islands tiny as ones
in microscopes or dioramas, who beckon or stretch
beneath white tarps that are leaden hair-fine strokes.
A smoking of game beneath torrential background.
A few feathers in the hair, not strokes enough
to designate clans or nations. As bricks dissolve
in mud, so mountainsides dissolve in pearly skies
that are mental refuges, barriers to real ones.
As I move to actual landscape alas it’s picturesque
as swirling half-moons rendered on black velvet
at some country fair or sidewalk art show.

3.
An estate-holder wanted his lands graced
with swans and the template of women with parasols
and tiny sloops to try the barely agitated water.
The wind moved, but water wouldn’t move by wind.
The water reflected the trees, which were not poplars,
the water reflected the women with the parasols
and white Hellenic dresses, and the swans were reflected.
The scene would be rendered on wood, with cornucopias
around the scene itself, in which the features were reflected:
scattered acorns, fruit and flora in commemoration--
tiger lillies and pine cones, more fruit to be identified.

4.
Already, I think in Piranesian castles
that double as dams on the Androscoggin
where people skinny-dip in familiar places
with the unfamiliar tints of pearly skies
and pearly clouds doubling as pearly gates.
The dream is a grain of sand in an hourglass
but within sprawls a time of infinite extension
that the shifting gears of a milk-truck interrupt
as the Anabaptists, skinny-dippers in a cove
in peasant dresses tell me that the water’s fine.