Of Cos Cob in Snow
Of Cos Cob in Snow
A December mist lifting from snow, the tree trunks
soaked to umber, splatters, here and there, of russet
beech leaves, lichen grey-green, grey-white snow—
the kind of morning Twachtman liked to paint.
I can step out my door and walk in it, making black
prints of boot in the melt, marking the swizzle lines
of weeping cherry, fan-like sprays of blue spruce.
I crave a Japanese sense of the delicate-whole, mad
as a monk for the snowcapped heights of Fujiyama,
the lower mountain suspended in cloud, save for
three storks cutting a diagonal path. A swatch,
a swipe, a drag of the dry brush, impasto next to
the bleed-through weave of linen. An old wall drifts
left and right, dips and rises, wears a ribbon of lacy
ice. How did the painter keep his hands from freezing
as he plod around Round Hill, worked the easel
into the muck beside Horseneck Brook? Can gloved
hands handle the brush? Americans, it was claimed,
“were formulating an impressionism minus its
violence, force, and virile power.” Well enough.
It’s true. Here, in Twachtman, is the pliant, the vague,
the vacuous release, as if the very breath of the year
were expiring in haze, yet how tender it looks, a place
to be lost in and buoyed by, the New England pastoral
the Pilgrims dreamt of. We take it for the save-yourself
virtues of the illumined large in a tonal range that
whispers peace. Cos Cob in snow more than a century
ago, marked by the ever patient force that waits to move
through us again, caught as the ghost of something else.
From: Brave Disguises
Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2002