Weatherbeaten

literature

at Winslow Homer’s studio, Prouts Neck 

words by don colburn

When you paint, he told the others, try

to put down exactly what you see.

Whatever else you have to offer

will come out anyway. The studio

where he lived a long time alone

was an old carriage house. For privacy

he had it moved about a hundred feet

and kept the entry hidden from the road. 

Medusa was his door knocker. 

Windows faced the water so he could too

across haphazard rock. No beach.

The foreground was a thickety hedge

and uncut grass where he heard the bobolink.

He hated being asked what a painting was

about. If the paint couldn’t tell you, never mind.

Still he gave each one a name: The Herring Net,

Northeaster, Breezing Up, Incoming Tide.

And my favorite, Weatherbeaten,

which we saw this morning at the museum

before the bus ride out to Prouts Neck. 

The paint in Weatherbeaten tells of sea

and wind and rock and atmosphere — 

what he must have seen exactly

on a dark day like this, the backlit surf

blown white into the air beyond outcrops.

Whatever else he had to offer came out

anyway — solitude and love

for the ever-changing danger of the sea.

It comes out even here, indoors, 

where the wall toward the road has no view.

But if by chance he turned that way 

his inner ear still heard the surf

and his mind’s eye pictured ocean waves,

as when he scratched into the knotty pine

two lines of weatherbeaten symmetry:

Turn, turn, tumble

tumble, turn, turn.