As if the soul of the town were laid out,
displayed in the auditorium at Town Hall
(velvet-curtained stage, a horseshoe balcony
ringing a wide arena of drafty winter air),
here’s a century hauled down from attics,
pulled from closets and neglected walls:
modernities, one after the other:
watercolored woodblocks of bohemians
who fled the Village for light and cheap rents,
their flattened tiers of piers and houses stacked
high within the frame; Cubist constructions
—more piles of blocks, after someone’s winter
in France—and then biomorphic shapes
looming from some grave collectivity,
then pure paint: brushstroke and gesture
dominate big pushy sprawls, tawny fields
brushed in blacks and grays—waves
of the newest thing now quaint, historical,
and mostly dreadful—especially the last forty
years or so, whose period styles don’t seem
remote enough to charm: not these psychedelic collages,
these beach-drift assemblages, or haunted faces
peering out of—a Rorschach bloodclot
meant to conjure hell? Who’ll buy this stuff?
A crowd of bidders—a few we know, mostly not,
dealers in town for an afternoon, holidayers,
condo owners out to deck their new high-ceilinged
halls with some token of the local. Abstraction,
instances of pure form? No opening bid.
Pass it then. Location, location; why else buy
some orange-and-lavender neo-Impressionist
portrait of the bay, or a cottage splashed in roses,
an earnest fisherman earnestly sketched?
The local sells, and numbers flash more freely,
hands leaping into air. This driftwood whale?
I have a hundred all over the house! Still, mixed in
among the junk, evidences of actual enchantment,
craft rising to meet the painter’s plain delight
in a row of varnished trees beside some Dutch canal,
or the lifted, backlit foam of a wave curling
half a canvas high, or some lean friend’s
angled torso tapered to a bare twist of waist,
those low-slung sailor pants studied, rendered,
adored. If the paint has darkened or abraded,
the stretcher pushed against the linen till it’s torn,
those sunny shoulders are beloved still;
these crooked houses mount in crooked tiers
their windy hill; that coldest swell will never break,
not while this town’s steeples poke up into the night.
We’ve been here our hour, and failed to buy
the drawing that we chose; a penciled,
freewheeling heap of geometry signed
Emily Farnham, Provincetown, 1950,
her signature formal, large as the angled strokes
intended to make sound visible, as if
she sketched some wry phrase of Poulenc,
or a serious saxophone. We didn’t know
her famous teacher had corrected her work,
in the upper right hand corner, sketching
his own quick version of her forms—his hand,
it’s true, far firmer than hers. His mark drives
the bidding wild. Oh well; we’d wanted it an hour,
and in an hour will think of it no more.
Now someone else has bought a tiny Hans Hofmann,
scribbled onto Emily’s page. We bundle up,
out the double doors, hungry and late,
but pause as who would not at the vestibule windows,
high over the postcard view, the ring of stacked houses
fronting the twilight expanse of bay beneath
a new-starred December so blue, who could say?
Art’s all bad, isn’t it; what doesn’t fail?
And thus there’s something noble about the crap, too,
the hopeful and misguided as much a part
of this town’s soul as any achievement is. We live
by our intentions, after all. Orion, his vertical belt faint,
three stars bewitched by woodsmoke,
hangs horizontal in that blue so clear and deep
words must simply slink away, defeated villains
in some grade-school play—who will, of course,
return for the next performance, trying again,
before the story winds on to the comfort of their defeat,
and all’s made well again, and our town can sleep,
safely indescribable, though painted again and again,
its secrets intact, only a little of it sold.