E. W. Bohannon rests upright under glass,
blind blue gaze dignified and detached, calmly
afloat on a pale sea, enigmatic doldrums
of cured oil beiges contoured
on a flat stretched canvas.
More often than I should I pause here,
my rushed steps down this tiled, wax-dusted hall
slowed, drawn to the painterly portrait
of this long-dead educator
and my own superimposed reflection,
shadowed palimpsest that traces a third face
silent planes of my own grandmother’s
whose years (and her children’s)
at boarding schools
Red Lake Mission
Tomah
Hayward
Vermilion Lake
Red Lake Government
Pipestone
coincided with E.W.’s tenure and now
collide in the layering of countenances
pondering his academic gown hood demeanor
and his civilized world of books and order
preserved in oils now dry
and fragile as his flesh and bones
long moldered to powder underground
in darkness to dust.
The brass plate at the bottom of the portrait
Eugene William Bohannon
President, Duluth State Teachers College
1901–1938
is a small grave marker in a toy cemetery,
a headstone at the foot of a canvas imitation
of life forgotten for a half-century
while the world beyond the storage vault
reinvented itself history repeating history,
the robed and seated scholar shrouded
indefinitely in brown paper secured by twine
while he waited as Wells’s time traveler
for the machine to halt and tip him sideways
back into the endless argument over what is light
and what is dark, what is Eloi and what is Morlock.
Since his resurrection, E.W. has seen the light
of day only in the building that bears his name
in this dreamlike portrait painted
in what looks like the most civilized of times.
From behind glass he blinks, slowly,
through the reflection of my grandmother’s eyes
at this loiterer that I am,
who pauses more often than she should at this case
to wonder, to ponder the parallel worlds
between his existence, her grandmother’s, and her own,
attempting and failing to reconcile the present with the past.
Fearlessly—I hope—we stare him down,
my grandmother’s shadow and I.
Without expression we blink slowly back
at E. W. Bohannon, upright under glass.