Stairway of Farewells
They hesitate on the stairs, all three women, poised as if to wave back to the place where they came from, their descent well underway. One grips the rail and smiles, as does another, stylish in red, hem spilling into her past and future. The third figure in this painting (by the not-yet-Futurist Balla) sacked in black, winded from the stairs, must lean against the wall. Her face is red, burning through her mourning. She waves her fitter cohorts on, prayerful that the rail is there to guide her slow descent down into the open air of her neighborhood, a descent that led her through an oscillating vortex of future loss that she no longer has the strength to rail against. The younger others smile and keep staring back, though soon they’ll both be riding the wave, veiled hats bobbing on the crest, down into the blood-red depths. It is, I suppose, the shyer one, the one in red who won’t return, whose anticipated descent will seem to the other abduction, and her arms will wave like a ululating voice, unconvinced the future will return her daughter. The pause, then, on these stairs seems calculated to derail the story—all those perspective lines like rail- road tracks that vanish in a distance. We’ve already read the ending time and again. The ending that makes my stare fix them in a gaze that will not halt descent, and will not change a future determined by the picture plane. Only a New Wave that submerges vanishing points, a wave as twisted as the stairway with its serpentine rail, will (as Balla was to later know) fix the future in the present—innocent as the girl in red who stretches out her visit into the long descent, even when she takes, two at a time, the stairs. Leonard Kress Leonard Kress has published poetry and fiction in Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex, Thirteens, and Braids & Other Sestinas, and Walk Like Bo Diddley (to be released this fall.) He teaches philosophy and religion at Owens College in Ohio and edits creative non-fiction for Artful Dodge.
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November 2024
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