swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

oceans of distance
Jesse Curran

← back or next →

White Cloud, 1932, Helen Torr

White Cloud, 1932
~Helen Torr

It is a painting worthy of the place. Venetian Beaux Arts
formed in the space between two necks. The locals
dub it the little castle with its right-angled figure,
tall arched windows and wrought iron railings. It sits
at the center of four harbors. Warning sailors of erratics.
Guiding them to safe haven. It marks a refuge from the Sound,
from what they call the Devil’s Belt. The riprap is rumored
to have been barged out from the depths of Manhattan
excess earth in need of a new home, piles of the subway’s
purge, chunks of earth and stone dropped and stacked here,
while the dredging machines steam in and out of the harbors
mining and shipping sand for Manhattan’s skyscrapers
and sidewalks. In the painting, the riprap looks like sea glass
rare finds, aquamarine and pale green. Today, I tour it.
It’s muggy and mid-July with thunder rumbling and the riprap
is dayglo phosphorescence, the clinging seaweed is neon,
the caramel barnacles slime over slate gray stone. I climb
to the top, listening to four tour guides tell the same stories
in four different ways. Stories about keepers and osprey babies
and keepers’ sons and how the old lighthouse burned down.
The log book notes cloudy day after day in a long-lost cursive.
Not all clouds cloud vision. Some are exquisite. Some
amplify light. Partly cloudy can be partly paradise.
A century between us, the plume in your painting guides me
to see flush in clouds—ruddiness and honey-ness, shades
of peach and blush. How many times did you tack and jib
circling the little castle? How many shapes did you sketch
as the spray leapt from the leeward lean? Today, the captain’s
tanned arms and the ways he ties knots does more for me
than the experts on the Fresnel lens and the many miles
it might beam. A castle among the clouds, stuck out
in the harbor’s mouth, a gesture of grace on an island
of Manhattan rubble. Riprap like sea glass. More clouds
than sky. Getting to the lighthouse is time streaming by,
regardless of whether it will be fine. Getting there
is flashes of meaning amidst all the blunders. Riprap
like sea glass and a painting fixed in time.

Night Spirit, 1927
~Helen Torr

I painted all day on red and blue thing, good.
-Helen Torr’s Diary, January 1927

When I saw this one in the dark warehouse, I think I finally saw you.
I didn’t expect to. I didn’t expect to see the depth and texture, the ardent
downward lines. The rawness. It was Lily Briscoe’s triangle. It stole me away.
The daily miracles, the matches struck, as Woolf wrote, unexpectedly
in the dark. That flash. A painting aligns with a book. Or what Woolf
was after. Or Lily Briscoe.  Radical interiority. The oceans of distance
between my mind and yours. All the ways we fail to read one another.
Then, the shape that forms when we finally connect. Unity of mother
and child. Here is red and blue and silver. Here is oil on metal. Here
are women casting downward streaks. Here is motion and reaching
and longing and desire. Here is back floating in the bays of annihilation.
When I saw it, I wrote in my notebook, I’m glad it was a dark warehouse.
Women are dark warehouses. Storing spirits. Storing archives of grief
and memory. Storing blood and tissue and scars and tears. I too
am a dark warehouse. The year is 1927. Woolf publishes To the Lighthouse.
You paint Night Spirit. You know it is good. You note so in your diary.
It is a tiny work. Just shy of a foot by eight-and-a-half inches. These
are colors of flesh, of eyes, of ice, of melting. It is January. You are
in a boat on the harbor. Layered in scratchy wool, breathing in turpentine.
The cold wind swells through the walls of the yawl. It is dark.
Even though everything freezes, the blood flows inside you.
The moon beams off the ice. The night is a neighbor. The spirit dances.

Sea Shell, 1928
~Helen Torr

A shell is a sign of something just right.
Miniature affirmation of design.
Callous outside, ready to protect—
Iridescent inside flashing back at the sun.
Some of us have nerves that run
through the walls of the house.
Some have bodies that bleed
both with waxing and waning.
Your shell, an ear longing for listening.
Reds, I wish I could have given you
a glaze to guard you from the cruelty
of critics, all the chauvinist chatter
calling all the shots. I wish I could have
somehow saved you from the sickness
in your stomach. I would have brought you
another wool sweater to button up
against the damp and how it hollows.
We could have taken a slow stroll
down the shore, some beach glass
in our pockets. I would send you
a handmade card with pressed leaves,
posted in mid-December. And words
with my inky pen, an affirmation
of your work, of painting after painting
gone right.

These poems are ekphrastic engagements with the work of Helen Torr. Torr was the partner of Arthur Dove, but her work was largely overshadowed and underappreciated during her lifetime. The poems are part of a larger project I am working on of linked poems and essays on Dove and Torr’s connections to the North Shore of Long Island.

← back or next →