An Art

She painted what she was—water, hunger, salt—
her brush foxed, gnawed a grainy texture
as the tide line shifted, dropping its briny hard-licked
treasures—cowry, sand dollar, sweet pink mollusk,
the sanded-down abandoned tusks of the sea.

She left the canvases. I kept them,
but frames were not the anchor they wanted.
The paint glistens, throwing points of light.
Even where the oils were scrubbed in hard, they
undulate in blue suspiros.

Someday, I tell her, I will make an art that will tell you
everything. I miss your painting of the beach
where it hung on the hallway wall. I will put it back
when the repairs are finished. When I can bear
the pressure of the sea.

Sunset rouge—rose madder on an ochre beach.
The water’s rolling kiss, a blue-green good-bye.
All of it missing a narrator. In a landscape of bright exits,
only broken things return—chipped or halved, uninhabited,
bearing names from a pirate dream:

beaded periwinkle, lion’s
paw, angel
wing,
pear
whelk.

Rebecca Ellis lives in southern Illinois.  Her poems have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, Sugar Mule, Sweet, Prairie Schooner, Natural Bridge, Adanna, RHINO, and Crab Creek Review. She edited Cherry Pie Press, publishing nine poetry chapbooks by Midwestern women poets, and is a supporter of the St. Louis Poetry Center.