​The Artist Has Laid Down His Brush And is Done, by Carol Willette Bachofner

This poem is inspired by Her Room, by Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1963.
 ​https://collection.farnsworthmuseum.org/objects/1251/her-room
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​The Artist Has Laid Down His Brush And is Done
          
for Betsy Wyeth

The same curtains blowing at the window, the same
wallpaper, but peeling a bit now, faded and water-stained.
The conch shell, empty as his chair, blows the same sea across 
the cove of your ear as you lift it to your head like before.

Bring home the gulls to your roof with a long low whistle
from the conch, bring neighbors with casseroles, bring
the dog from his lapping the melt of ice in the dooryard.
Bring your same fingers to draw the curtains aside.

Step through each room, their creaking floors like old bones,
careful and slow. Watch the leaves of his sketchbook ruffle
in the breath of the open window as if he’s thumbing 
them, deciding which drawing or sketch wants paint today.

The same scenes are never to be the same without his careful eye. 
The conch will go silent, the chair unmoved and dusty.
Somehow a shaft of sudden sun slanting the floor won’t be
the same kind of light he saw. Even the dog will not snore the same.

People will call and ask of you now that the artist has laid down
his brush and is done. You won’t answer because you are not the same
as you were just yesterday. They will ask for some small memory
of your time with him and you will say, the wallpaper holds all his secrets.

Carol Willette Bachofner
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Carol Willette Bachofner is an award-winning poet, memoirist, photographer, and watercolourist. She served as Poet Laureate of Rockland from 2012 -2016. Carol is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Test Pattern, a Fantod of Prose Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She is at work on a mixed genre memoir, A Life Beset With Words.  Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, such as Prairie Schooner, The Connecticut Review, The Comstock Review, Cream City Review, as well as in the anthology, Dawnland Voices: an Anthology of Writings from Indigenous New England (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).