The Story: The River

There is a kind of love that arrives already in motion. It does not settle in the shallows. It comes down out of weather, gold in the trees, blue in the deep water, white where the current breaks its own back on the stone. The River is that love, painted as one thing with the poem that names it.

The voice has been looking for a place to belong, and finding, instead, the old pull: lovers, moonlight, the long run of oh-so-long. Belonging, here, is not a harbor. It is a current. To hold it is to admit you cannot hold it. To tell it is to speak into water. The question at the center is not whether the river is too much. The question is whether someone will love it as a river.

Lonesome is not emptiness in this work. It is depth. Love as strong as a river deep, as long as a river long, is not a tame promise. It is aimless only in the way a great water is aimless, running sea to sea because that is what it was made to do. Careless, yes, of banks and of clocks. Faithful to its own fall.

What sets us free is not the stilling of that force. It is the meeting. If someone like you ever loved a raging river like me. The line is hope without apology. The painting keeps the white water in the foreground, the dark trees at the edge, the sky broken open above. Nothing is calmed for the sake of the room. The poem sits inside the weather, not beside it.

Hung, The River does not decorate a wall so much as give the wall a direction. It is for the collector who has stopped asking the strong thing to become smaller, and has begun to ask whether love can be large enough to go with it.

Collection:  Architecture of Stillness