La Cinquième Saison, by Dotty LeMieux

The Fifth Season, by Rene Magritte (Belgium). 1943.

The Domain of Arnheim, by Rene Magritte (Belgium). 1962.

La Cinquième Saison (on seeing the Magritte exhibition, The Fifth Season, at S.F. MOMA) 

When the two men carrying framed paintings pass, they will exchange canvases. Their landscapes will be rearranged; they will emerge as different men; they will be mirror images of each other; they will be Groucho and Harpo Marx; they will walk into parallel universes where worlds do not collide; they will burst into song; they will brawl in the street, their paintings torn and pixilated; they will move from pointillism to surrealism to impressionism to abstract expressionism to a pair of empty frames.

They will never pass; they will tip their hats; they will bow; they will shake hands; they will do a dance around each other; they will toss their paintings into the street and start to wrestle; they will knock each other out of the painting and into another canvas; they will die and be buried in a rose and be reborn in an era that does not appreciate them; they will sell their art to the highest bidder; they will become outsider artists drawing on walls and empty spaces between walls and starry nights on black canvases; they will be hopelessly lost.

They will be redeemed; they will pass each other again and again, their canvases will become LED screens streaming episodes of Babylon Berlin and The Americans; they will fight in World War II and World War III and they will join the Taliban and they will inhabit landscapes they never dreamed of and they will lose each other again and never see that they are behind each other; they have each other’s backs.

Their landscapes will melt into charred bodies that are not their bodies and they will rise like Phoenixes and merge with the boulder.

Today is the day we learn if their eggs hatch. 

Dotty LeMieux

​Dotty LeMieux has published three chapbooks and edited the eclectic journal Turkey Buzzard Review in the equally eclectic West Coast enclave of Bolinas California. She has seen her work in various publications such as Rise Up Review, Painted Bride, The Poeming Pigeon, Tuck, Telephone, and the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, among others. She lives and works as a campaign consultant and attorney in Northern California with her husband and two dogs.