Cape Cod

Poems to the Sea

Joseph Mallord William Turner Sunset off Margate Pier c.1840–5

“I'm wondering what color you would choose if you'll paint your feelings”

Opening the eyelid of the airplane window to reveal the synaptic map of the city with the tiny white lights of cars moving along the soft orange tunnels of the highway lights and then flowing back as red tail lights in the other direction tracing the unending complex grid we have laid over our curved earth, my WhatsApp blipped. My friend Yuri was checking in on my visit to Cape Cod and asked me the question: “I’m wondering what colour you would choose if you’ll paint your feelings.” It was midnight and I was floating low in a tiny aircraft over one of the cities between Boston and Toronto returning home exhausted and my phone was about to die and I tried to answer with a snippet of my thoughts. But now, rested and looking back, I want to try to answer again. The colour of my feelings about my three-day trip to Boston is so plural that it’s taken me some time to answer because the adventure was a mixture and I could only ever give you a few of its colours.

Brindle

I saw baby goats with a steel pan drum playing in the background of Jamaica night blended with Amy laughing at the farm on the Cape. And then later a baby rabbit in a brindle blur across the laneway and into the thick bushes all fragrant with honeysuckle, and behind the bushes the sound of the sea that was impossible to get to. The beach access blocked by low-slung wooden architect-designed beach houses salted grey by the ocean, and you imagine couples filling another glass of expensive wine to talk over their divorce. My long-time ink collaborator Marta Abbott and I, found one almost-path beside a house near the end of the road that no one was staying in and snuck along the side to find a patch of beach. I ate farm snap peas and she drank fizzy Oregon wine and we filled in the blanks having only ever collaborated over the postal service or the internet, and you might describe the sky which I barely noticed, as the colour of apricot gelato, and the tide kept making our beach smaller and smaller and the night came and the stars were echoed in the fireflies on either side of the lane on our way back to the car and the limo was cancelled and Amy’s mother was woken up to get the suitcases and night flowed south down to Providence.

Pastel Lightning

On the highway that night there was a kind of heat lightning that was every pastel colour but it did not rain and I woke up on a short, antique analysand’s couch at an Ivy League doctor’s house that felt like Snow White with all the visiting animals. There were pastries and cold green tea and an otherworldly Joseph Sudek photograph like a painting, and I took a phone call with my therapist in the hot rental car and then drove down the coast to find the dunes and the sea that were so formative for me and I thought might hold a key to my next children’s book. But the dunes were cordoned off to protect their delicate biodiversity, so I found smooth rocks along the shore, choosing one for each person that I love back home and then I threw them back in the sea with the salt and the seaweed and my memories.

Josef Sudek.  Still life with a shell, 1961.

Demerara

And there, on the shore, alone, half-in and half-out of the ocean, a third baby animal. This time a sandpiper its downy coat the colour of Demerara sugar sand seen through the foam of the sea.

Marigold Lake

At the farm with the baby goats, I met not just Marta Abbott but also Kathy Hattori president of Botanical Colours and Sustainability, and Communications Director, Amy DuFault, and Sasha Doer (another of my heroes), who all were finishing a workshop in natural dying and there was lichen and seaweed and flowers and weeds and all the things I love to work with but in big dye vats. The colour that was most intensified was the lake pigment, and I scooped out a bit of the undried stuff to take with me leftover from the marigold flowers, and we went back to Amy’s mom’s back porch and we talked about a children’s book with only words that had whole gardens floating in the sky via hot-air balloon, and why their are so few men in the natural colour scene, and the husband and wife volcano-cinematographers who died in a volcano, and the robot that spotted us at the Stop and Shop, and I felt the importance of the matrix of colour people from farms in the deep south and the Bay area and up the coast through Washington into Canada and over to Hawaii. And how to keep connected to the at-hand joy of found colours in a country where every day there was an existential threat to women and all humanity. Somehow I couldn’t stop listening to NPR’s broadcast of the full January 6th testimony, the horrific Supreme court rulings criminalizing women’s rights to their own bodies and the gutting the EPA’s ability to protect the earth while the little scoop of marigold muck hummed in its mason jar in the trunk of the rental car like a little piece of the fight for a caring world, and I put a blob of it in my sketchbook in case it didn’t make it over the border.

Cy Twombly Poems To The Sea I-IV, 1959

Murky Pink

Just before I got on the plane I met Téju Cole at MFA Boston and he was just about to go to Greece to write for the New York Times and for another more secret reason that even he did not yet know, and he took me past the Cy Twombly sculptures and ancient Greek shards and storied storage jars and the giant Singer Sargent, and into the Turner exhibition and my head was spinning with the way his mind works and all that I was seeing. But there was one painting we stopped at that I could not forget, where the king was landing on the shores of England and being greeted by some sort of consortium. But you only knew this by the title because you could not see the king and could only just make out a ship or maybe a smaller emissary boat and just barely the hint of the cliffs. Mostly what you saw was an embattled clay-coloured sky and the beach and spray of breakers, and right in the middle of the painting, a perfect smudgy pink grey kind of eraser-coloured square that gave you just enough to know it was flag held up in unplaceable poignancy in the midst of all the vagueness of the painting. It was a pink like hope.

A final colour

Back in the airplane I was thinking over Yuri’s question, smiling to myself that my meeting with the editor had gone so well, and circling the beautiful apocalyptic glowing city . And then I saw something way down there was blooming like a jellyfish made of dots or a dandelion’s white sphere of seeds. I leaned into the port-hole window and saw that someone had set off a glittering pinkish-whiteish-green-blue firework directly below us. And up there it was the silent and beautiful first flower of Canada Day. Down on earth setting off fireworks disrupts ecology, pollutes the air and disturbs everyone who has ever lived through real explosions bullets and bombs from the air. Patriotic fireworks garishly celebrate the arbitrary beginning of a country invented to support a colonial system that continues to abuse the indigenous people and landscape it claims to encompass. As magical as fireworks used to seem to me it might be time for them to go. The plane tipped downwards and the closer I got to the ground the more the scene started looking like a generic concrete suburb but in my backpack was a small vial of subtle colour with a hopeful heart.

JL

July 2 sketchbook. Foraged pigments, coffee, dye bath dregs on paper.