Building the Boat, Trèboul (1930)
after the painting by Christopher Wood
Half-way, the basket nature of the ship
reveals itself, to us though not perhaps
to the two men or the women bringing material
or sitting in gossip on the quay, for, though real
enough to place the setting—Normandy,
let’s say—the quotidian, like drama, demands
the craned neck of symbolism and not just
the calm chew of experience. Meaning trusts
variables, as if any sequel of actions
and jot of causes, accidents, and apprehensions
which converge into an event—a temporal
thing free from the things in it, the moral
and aesthetic, even the tangled beings involved—
yearned for the fill of horizons. A puzzle is solved
when it can sustain, like a bulging sail, multiple
endings, all equally true and loyal
to the root of mystery. The ship, then, is a basket
on the still-life of the dock, a cradle, though not a casket,
for who builds his own rocking end joyous
with the sweat of labor? The ribbed beams, yes,
are skeletal, and the side planks presage the shells
we hide in to face the world. But the swells
this vessel will ride, and the bolt and shadow
that frees the molten sea from the syllogism of meadow
and valley, tell us there is no thing or process
that doesn’t envy art’s prism of choices.
