Blue Horses in the Rain—after Franz Marc

BLUE HORSES IN THE RAIN

A child's watercolor set invited me to the breakfast table of a house perched on the crest of Mount Vider. The Napa Valley, shrouded in fog, barely visible caves, like puncture marks on the ridge opposite. I am a houseguest applying color to pale toast and blank paper. I fill the pages with color and think of Franz Marc's Blue Horses in the Rain. He died very close to Lascaux. Calligraphy of bison before the hunt. Ochre pigment. Hemitite. When a child found the painted caves, at first no one believed her stories of bison and horses running across rock ceiling. Not even her father. Especially her father.

As I paint, a woman silhouetted against the morning sun, comes over and asks me if I always awaken like this. We are both writers. A small flickering arrow in my stomach—and I wonder why I no longer wake with a brush in my hand, tracing a pale yellow wash across the white of morning. I cannot write, the blood clots my pen. The sunlight on her hair blinds me. My father, an absence of light, I am torn between the obsidian darkness of two worlds.

Yesterday, my notebook stumbled down a steep ravine and landed face-down on a branch of poison oak suspended above a creek. My writing saved by poison. On the way back up the ravine, the sound of an oncoming car hurried me and I tore my skirt. I though of the swaddled mummies of Nazca, and the cycle of earlier fires—tree carbon transformed to ink markings on the page. The land is the color of cinnibar and discarded shells.

I can’t shake this aftermath of sleep and the deaths I dream of: those I know, and those of strangers. The night is becoming too crowded. A friend blames the ghosts in my mirrors, there are too many of them. That’s why they come. I am shivering from what I have heard. Someone asks, Are you a mother? This paper becomes a rock wall. I hold my brush poised in the air waiting for the blue horses to come pouring down from the sky.

7/86 & 3/94