Jesse Wallis

ON SEEING

To see if the composition of a painting could be improved,
Andrew Wyeth would turn the damp canvas upside down
and look at it anew—with the subject, in a sense, removed.

In this way, it wasn’t any thing he’d painted that he viewed.
Old farmhouses were simply rectangles of gray and brown,
and he’d note how the overall structure might be improved.

A portrait of his wife in an elegant cartwheel hat she loved
became light, shade, texture—the same as the background.
He saw it anew, both the subject and the emotion removed.

He followed every line to see how the viewer’s eye moved
from billowing lace curtains to the horizon, and then found
where the composition he’d envisioned could be improved.

Even his long-secret mistress, reclining on their bed, nude,
would disappear out of her flushed flesh, warm and round.
Seeing her shapes anew, all senses but the visual removed.

The final abstraction of any art is what the method proved.
Something like reading sheet music and hearing the sounds.
Sometimes, there was nothing for the eye itself to improve.
Right side up, the subject seen anew, all of the art removed.

JESSE WALLIS has been a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Image, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and Zyzzyva. He studied writing and film at the University of Iowa and, prior to that, art at Syracuse University and the California Institute of the Arts.