The Painter
The painter may or may not have believed in the realm of spirits, or God, or some animating source of a cosmos which, according to astrophysicists, was dominantly constituted by dark matter, did not interact with light, and was not observable. She wondered about such dominance, and of course knew this was, in part, why she was a painter, but the difficulty of her life was not primarily in deciding which objects and persons, light and weather, which mood or how stark a horizon to draw a painting’s story; the difficulty was when—maybe suddenly, maybe after a traceable sequence of events—she felt arrested by a catch in the matter, a sense that something other than her minor art knew her. Which, thinking further into these sensations, made her wonder what else the knowing knew. This was the difficulty. Could it, had it the desire, also paint, or did the painter possess an ability the source of ghosts did not possess? Looking away from the wet landscape—she was beginning to capture the wind of the meadow—she hoped it was so. And then feared it.
Katie Ford is the author of four books of poems: Deposition; Colosseum; Blood Lyrics; and If You Have to Go, all published by Graywolf Press. Blood Lyrics was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. International invitations to read and lecture include festivals in Tunis, Morocco, Oslo, and Stockholm. She completed graduate work in world religions, theology and poetry at Harvard University, and, following that, received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and the Norton Introduction to Literature. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside where she is a Professor of Creative Writing. Please visit www.fordkatie.com for more information.