Red,
Before riding to SeaGate we think to how long it’s been since we last drank an ocean beer. Not since we last saw our sister, we think, so we bring along a cold one, a corona. Lay in the sand, watch dalmatians chase sea foam in and out, listen close to the calls of the waterbirds and loving mothers.
And all day we think about Mazunte. How our sister had rings on her fingers and sand in her hair.
It was our last real Tuesday, the beginning and end of everything at once. Crosslegged on the rocks we spent the afternoon admiring mountain people. The sun setting was warm and yellow and our sister’s eyes shone a pure shade of green, like emeralds.
She sang about the ocean, how people are drawn to it for all its endlessnesses. How it paints three infinities in the sand and sea, the sky, and how these infinities reveal the ends of other things.
Borders, like the edges of rock and hand and leaf, or like how a fallen tree reminds us the standing ones are living.
Later, wading in the moonlight, we found ourselves on the cusp of some desperate revelation. Some kind of unity, we think, like a single color.
The light on the water was clear, it was silver, and a white triangle hung just above it. Something like Denes would design, we thought, and on our way back up the hillside our sister said,
Look, man, we have moon shadows. The sea can’t be caged, brother. You know, we’re gone.
The boats on the horizon are long and black here, Red. We crave art suddenly, think to visit the museum director, then sink to remember how his gates have locked.
And so we go to visit the painter. Ride north carefully, toss stones to her studio window. Standing in the dirt we see her purple eyes have reddened, Red, she’s mourning, so we ask to be her model a minute. To be her small distraction before the sun sets.
Laughing, hanging her black hair down, she shows us a crown of little blue flowers. They’re made of paper, she says, which means they’ll never wilt, and the price of admission is a song.
So we recite the rondeau we wrote for you in the beginning. Sing:
Yes, she says, an honest trade. Then she lets us up.
Inside she’s wiping clay from her hands like a ritual, reveals the red shine of her Egyptian ring. We undress for her completely, Red. Pour sand from our boot, close our eyes tight to let her work.
But her studio is familiar. We’ve memorized the cascade smell of turpentine, the orange paint pattern on her concrete floor. How an autumn’s light might fall slant across her leg, or a cloud could pass from within the tall loft window.
Oh, yeah, and those perfect black incisions within the jade colored eyes of her cat, Ripple, and we know — we know it exactly, Red— the pattern of flowers on her cornflower apron.
We also know how, before all this, the painter studied dog shapes in a little town on the border, how somewhere inside her history came a series of paintings called Parade Horse.
Her grandfather was a pianist, a rancher, and while she listens to his tapes she dances, she twirls with close attention, and these horse paintings just fall out. She won’t let us listen but says the tapes contain Vivaldi, Ravel, and most importantly, she says, they’re a record of her grandmother opening cupboard doors and lighting cigarettes, or just simply listening.
The pieces are viscously white, Red, like winter white. Like pain white, and all of them are horselike. Like they have the attitudes of horses, or carry a weight, a burden like horselike memory.
After our posing we dress and look into the newest piece, lose ourselves a while, like in a fever we shiver, and then we understand in it something new about caves. Something new about leaving, about pain, about reopening.
All that matters is how far we’ve come through the rock, the painter says. And that, man, that’s not decided by you.
So before she can kick us out, Red, we are gone. We’re gone before she can say another thing.
Dyl