Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Chambered Nautilus (1956)
- Her dynamic fragility is a shell without ocean.
- Four-poster bed, its canopy hangs in pleats. She refuses sleep for the sun’s course.
- I’ve painted her propped-up in the bed, half-committed to rest and half-poised to climb out the window, to join the noonday orb and to let that much heal her.
- Scleroderma.
* Autoimmune malady.
† Hard + derma.
‡ Before, she’d travel miles for the best corn, freshest eggs.
- She reaches for the Bible, paper, and pencil like old friends.
- When the hands fatigue, she places the items back into the wicker basket, and she turns toward the window.
- Sun burns the window white, burrows into that stark room.
- Her gaze: not at the window.
- Her systems, systemic, and we suspect it won’t be long now.
- “The best way out is always through.” (Frost)
- An empty nautilus on the footstool at the foot of the bed.
- I could have painted the moment she held out both her hands when we presented it to her, peered inside, remarked on its pearl smoothness, its emptiness.
- I could have painted her description of its years of having been ocean-weathered and the life span of who once dwelled there, in a tiny sea-cave where it had lain sheltered and righteous.
- I could have painted how I actually fell in love with this woman.
- Held up to her ear, she perceives a rushing swirling noise, as if the ocean had deposited its sounds right there in that nautilus.
- She’s no fool; she knows it’s the sound of her own body: pulsing blood, heart’s thud.
- A soothing sound, signaling of life.
- Chamber.
* A place for bullets.
† A confinement.
‡ Cella, Latin for small room.
- When that day comes, we shall chamber her ashes into that nautilus, iridescent, and set that shell in her basket next to words forever unspoken.
