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Interior at Petworth
by Paul Franz
No need to give it form: he understands
The postures of this ritual, the dumb
Eulogy motioned in the chalky mouth
Of the hearth by the servant's careful hands:
Raking flat the grains of yesterday's flame,
Building again, persistent as a moth.
She figures briefly: vague gray breath between
His widened iris and the filtering
Sunlight. And he comprehends, the way
A painter does, prehensile, taking in
The light. He will not paint her. Other things
Distract his sight: the plaster, molding, stray
Dustmotes interposed. "What Turner paints,"
Hardy would later say, "is chiefly light,
As modified by objects." The light source
Is the source, erupting through the chance
Alignments of the shades of day and night
To drench the staggered landscapes and reverse
The sea and sky. But in this room? A beam
Filtering in from somewhere: the next room.
Untainted, would it warm or burn, that glare?
That swimming softness paddling through grime;
This dust and flaking plaster dense as loam.
The next room. Should he plant his easel there?
The ground is fertile there. The paint could bloom
Enraptured toward the light. The doorway calls:
A bright, half-circle mouth. He does not stir.
The dream of cataracts, the dream of loam,
The dream where one would hasten but one stalls,
All progress balked, all passages cut shear:
His heart, his hand invites it: blood and ash,
A dull, compacted coal. So brown impedes
The way from here to there, turns all to same:
The light, the walls, confounded. Here, a gash
Of reckless yellow ripples and exceeds:
All distances collapsing to the frame.
The wreckage of the manor-house: the fact
And dust of it. What's left to be imagined
Radiates in distance: changeless; too far
For images. One dreams the cataract,
Refracting like a gemstone: at the end
The drab of waking washes out the star.
The spotted iris registers what lingered.
Interior at Petworth, Tate, London,
Oil-on-canvas, eighteen-thirties, hundred
Twenty-two centimeters by ninety-one.
Discover something else to talk about.
Refuse. Fast. Extinguish. Rake it out.
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