New JKPP Portrait and a Poem

 "Kline, Brushing His Teeth"

6x9 inches, watercolor, for Julia Kay's Portrait Party

Every Thursday morning I drive to Milton and join a group of artists at the Gathering Place.  I always bring something I've painted during the week to show, and something small to work on, since I dislike hauling big projects out of the house.  I worked on drawing from my community figure drawing group a once or twice, but discovered that it made a couple of the Milton folks distinctly uncomfortable, so no more un-draped models there.  I've taken to preparing a drawing of a portrait for Julia Kay's Portrait Party, then painting it with the Gathering Place group; this was the one I finished yesterday. 

It has been a while since I posted a poem, so I went searching for one that had a toothbrush in it.  I found several, and oddly enough each one had something about a love affair in it.  Here's what I eventually decided to include here:

Vandergast and the Girl
By Louis Simpson

Vandergast to his neighbors—
the grinding of a garage door
and hiss of gravel in the driveway.

He worked for the insurance company  
whose talisman is a phoenix
rising in flames ... non omnis moriar.
From his desk he had a view of the street—

translucent raincoats, and umbrellas,  
fluorescent plate-glass windows.  
A girl knelt down, arranging
underwear on a female dummy—

sea waves and, on the gale,  
Venus, these busy days,
poised in her garter belt and stockings.

         *

The next day he saw her eating
in the restaurant where he usually ate.

Soon they were having lunch together  
elsewhere.
                She came from Dallas.
This was only a start, she was ambitious,  
twenty-five and still unmarried.
Green eyes with silver spiricles ...
red hair ...
                  When he held the car door open  
her legs were smooth and slender.

“I was wondering,”
she said, “when you'd get round to it,”  
and laughed.

         *

Vandergast says he never intended  
having an affair.
                           And was that what this was?  
The names that people give to things ...
What do definitions and divorce-court proceedings  
have to do with the breathless reality?

O little lamp at the bedside
with views of Venice and the Bay of Naples,  
you understood! Lactona toothbrush
and suitcase bought in a hurry,
you were the witnesses of the love
we made in bed together.

Schrafft's Chocolate Cherries, surely you remember  
when she said she'd be true forever,

and, watching “Dark Storm,” we decided  
there is something to be said, after all,
for soap opera, “if it makes people happy.”

         *

The Vandergasts are having some trouble  
finding a buyer for their house.

When I go for a walk with Tippy  
I pass the unweeded tennis court,
the empty garage, windows heavily shuttered.

Mrs. Vandergast took the children  
and went back to her family.

And Vandergast moved to New Jersey,  
where he works for an insurance company  
whose emblem is the Rock of Gibraltar—
the rest of his life laid out
with the child-support and alimony payments.

As for the girl, she vanished.

Was it worth it? Ask Vandergast.
You'd have to be Vandergast, looking through his eyes  
at the house across the street, in Orange, New Jersey.  
Maybe on wet days umbrellas and raincoats
set his heart thudding.
                                  Maybe
he talks to his pillow, and it whispers,  
moving red hair.

In any case, he will soon be forty.