Dear friends,

I have done a lot of writing over the past few months—more than perhaps any other time in my life—but most of it is not yet ready for public consumption for one reason or another. I have many submissions out, fifteen at last count, waiting at various journals for editorial processes to operate. Hopefully I will be able to share some of that work with you soon, but for now I am (or at least my writing is) in a weird state of limbo. Also, with summer comes a different schedule and kids home from school. Accordingly, I have not put much energy into this forum recently. My apologies.

In lieu of sharing a more substantial piece, here are some experiments I have been essaying recently—what I’ll call prose poems or flash essays about art, ekphrastic pieces to use the technical term. Is there anything here? I’m not sure. Let me know what you think.

Pieter Breughel the Elder, “The Harvesters”

In the middle distance, a dancing bear twirls slow for the circling crowd. A wagon trundles by beneath its yellow load of hay, and someone laughs. Nearby, two curlews flee as the mower fells the wheat in easy rows. A solitary tree wriggles into the air over a sleeper, drunk, jug in hand. Everything here moves at the pace of the tree, little by little taking form, little by little growing, little by little reaching up and out into the sky. The steeples of the churches must have taken decades to erect, taking shape with time alongside the fields and the loose grid of dirt roads. In the bay, far in the distance, little boats drift, looking for a breeze. Everything is play.

Piero della Francesca, “The Resurrection”

These soldiers could not wait for even one hour to ensure their prey was dead. Now they slump, wrapped in passive teal, against marble and wood, cheeks slack in that innocence that comes over each of us at rest, their pride and self-regard gone, freed of the burdens they imposed on themselves and others yesterday, yet to rise to face the coming dawn.

Over them he rises, crossing the bar in blood red, divided and yet one, solemn with the weight of this new life waking in him. His banner over them is triumph but not over them so much as for them. He is here for them, to coax them into leaf and bloom, if they would only wake.

John Singer Sargent, “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”

Every summer evening in childhood feels like this, though none is ever quite so beautiful. The blue and the orange, the dark and the bright, the tousled grass and the glowing flowers, all combine to give the garden a more than ordinary luminance.

And yet, and yet...I think I can recall an August twilight, catching fireflies on the lawn barefooted. Electric lights can take on only some of that warm peach glow, but in memory, I feel myself caught in all the light of Sargent's painting. I could never identify myself with these girls in their fresh white pinafores but in them I see again a hint of the glowing intensity of childhood, the burning delight brought to matchstick or Mason jar in the pursuit of some ordinary occupation for a summer's night. I too must have lit up like these two with the gladsome light of evening, simmered with attention enfolding an hour of fading light.

Happy summer. More from me before too long, I hope.

Thanks for reading—
Matt