Scattered Breath
by Julia Kool Talen
The first time I fall in love with you is at breakfast on a Sunday in May. You order an egg dish in a small cast iron. We share a French press. The napkins at the restaurant are square swatches of mismatched fabrics. You’re passing through Denver, visiting my dear friend Em, on your way back east. You both reminisce about last night. About the dive bar near DU. That game of darts I wish I’d been a part of. About how you went home with some married guy. Em plays with the rose quartz pendant on their necklace before taking another sip of chai. You wear pigtail buns and clear rimmed glasses and we both talk about getting tattoos one day. Em tells me about how yesterday at the farmer’s market they were selling bundles of lavender for fifteen dollars so instead you picked a bouquet from a bush of Russian sage near Colfax. When I pass this purple shrub on the way to work, I think of your grin, the freckle nestled in your left dimple.
End of April in my parents’ backyard in Missouri, lily of the valley grew in little batches. I pulled sprigs of it from the ground to make a bouquet. The blooms smelled like hard caramels. Something my grandmother would have kept in a jar in the living room next to her lipstick stained mug filled with white wine. I remember licking one of the soft white bells to see if the petals tasted like nectar. Instead, they tasted like silk, soft and mild.
I see PH-247 at the Clyfford Still Museum in the summer of 2017 for the first time. The painting’s size makes you feel like a minnow swallowed by a lagoon. The museum’s walls are made of concrete, crushed granite, and quartz, as if they emerged from the earth. Light pours in through the oval-netted ceiling, gleaming on the blustering surface of this sixteen foot canvas. I sit on the felted bench gazing at this piece while visitors pass by quickly taking selfies with it on their phones. PH-247 is covered in pallet-knifed strokes of dark navy and cobalt blue. But two lines, one that looks like a cement road and one that looks like a harp string, run off-center, parallel and vertical. Alpha and omega are written on the wall in a paragraph next to the painting.
I see a frozen lake for the first time last winter in northern Michigan.
Lake Superior stipples layers of ice onto snow dusted sand in the night-driven winters. The beach becomes another moon. In the mornings, last winter, I often carefully walk along the slick sidewalks to the shore to catch a sunrise. The lake isn’t completely ice-bound, more like a floating slush. The cold stings on mornings like these as light hovers in the sea salt clouds.
The last time I see a frozen lake is sometime in spring. I am about to turn 30. Superior is slippery and waking and lonely. The ice chunks look like plastic bags ready to lift off the water and be carried across the sunrisen sky with the wind toward a meadow. Then, onward. Toward another river, another runnel, another pond.
The next time I fall in love with you is at Grand Central Station. It’s the summer I am couch surfing on the east coast to get away from my relationship back in Denver. The summer I pick up a cherry seltzer from Mr. Kiwi’s every afternoon in June thinking of Big Thief. The summer I will eventually move out of Andy’s place and get baby bangs. The tiled floor at 42nd street is shinier than I remember, glimmering under the iconic constellated teal ceiling. The pisces, fickle, look away from my eyes towards the edge of my shoulders.
I am nervous to spend a whole day alone with you, wondering how we will fill the hours. I am worried about the potential silences between us. I am worried we will miss our train because you might be late, but you show up on time, as promised. We buy overpriced lattes and metro tickets, making our way to track 4. The trains hiss on the platforms. The tracks smell like rust and beer. That day you wear a cream colored tank top and a choker made of a red thread.
Enclosed in a pair of oval leaves is a lily of the valley’s slender raceme each with 6-14 teardrop blossoms. Eve’s tears from the garden. Tears wiped with a finger. Even though the flowers are bottom-side-up and drooping, I never saw the blooms as tears. They smelled too sweet. They looked more like they would float up and away instead of tumbling downward.
These fragrant blossoms are also associated with the Germanic pagan goddess Ostara. She ushered in the spring and was celebrated at the equinox, a time when daylight and moonlight perfectly cut an Earth’s orbit in half. People would burn the blooms at gatherings, ushering the warmth and light of the fire into the cold darkness of winter. Awakening spring. Pagans would scatter the ashes of this flower to fertilize the soil for spring planting. Ostara’s name was taken for Easter. I light a candle on my 30th birthday, when these flowers begin to pepper the wet ground.
In the dusty train seats, you offer me bagels you packed for the ride towards Beacon. Someone has sharpied a sun, moon, and clouds on the back of the seat in front of us. Initials are written inside an elliptical heart. You ask me questions about how my trip back to New York has been. What have I done. What do I miss most about the city. How is Denver. How is Andy. I haven’t heard from him in days. I always miss New York but don’t want to move back yet. I ask you about Ben. You don’t say much. Then, we listen to music, sharing your ear buds, a forked wire connecting us.
None of Still’s paintings have titles. Foregoing titles, Still said, People should look at the work itself and determine its meaning. The scientific name for lily of the valley is convallaria majalis. Convallaria translates to valley, majalis to the month of May. Each floral bract, a May valley of ruptures and silk whispers.
But I don’t want to determine the painting’s meaning. I want to know about the days Still was making PH-247. I’d like to know about what he was thinking, why he chose to explore the color blue. I’d like to know if he spoke, obsessively and at length with his second wife, Patricia, about the painting over bread and wine. If he hand-mixed his paints at the dinner table, how long he looked out his studio window at the wheelbarrow in the yard before returning to his palette knife. I’d like to know if he fought with his daughters during the time he was painting this piece, how many cigarettes he smoked while painting, how many times he paused, how many hours straight he’d work without eating or speaking to his family.
The hanging floweret of a lily of a valley kisses a mossy rock in Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis. It resembles a splurge of whipped cream, a cracked open pearl, a tiny jellyfish, a circle of snow falling from a branch on a warm winter day.
When I picked my first lily of the valley, I dipped my fingers in a stream of sink water. Holding the flower upside down, I watched liquid drips drop from my pinky into the lily’s cup, drawing a dotted line down through the damp breeze. Then I placed the green stem into a water-filled glass.
There was a crosshatch pattern on this glass. This glass that used to be my grandmother’s. Sunlight cast rainbow rectangles across my parents’ wooden kitchen table. Light bled through the red curtains, tinting the glass peach.
Storm King stretches 500 acres, and once we scan our tickets we forget about the city. About our lives outside of here. We walk through the woods, the open fields. We meander towards Maya Lin’s Wave Field. Hills and divets of grass that look as if they are being blown by the wind, back and forth. A field tide. The early sun casts half-moon shadows, beginning at the crest of each grass wave. You tell me this is your favorite. I agree. There are wind chime sculptures moving sound in and out of the air nearby. A fly lands on my pinky finger. I look at your angel hairs wisping, echoing.
Clyfford Still was obsessed with verticality. Having grown up poor in farm country during the Great Depression, standing up meant you were moving forward in the midst of dust, famine, anguish. Much of his early work depicts abstracted figures with grotesque, elongated hands that looks like plows and wrenches. The figures work in bleak fields tinctured with dark reds and purples.
The vertical line in Still’s work is a pulse, a living, a continuation. Moth wings beating. A dreaming cat’s tail. Fingers curling in blue grass. I see crowds swimming in the blue noons of PH-247. Quilted pieces of water. The cement line is a bridge across the water. The golden one is a sun ray, a telephone wire, a tendril of wheat.
Mornings at the frozen beach there is often an older woman walking her tiny dog. The fluffy white mutt has a neon green collar and chases the older woman’s ankles. She tells me that when she comes to the beach in the dawn, she thinks about how many ghosts are on the sand with us, watching Superior float rafts of ice towards and away. I am less interested in the ghosts standing on the shore with us and more interested in the water under the oblong ice chunks. I wonder how softly the white fish and yellow perch drift, if the jade and amber rocks on the lake’s floor are still waiting to be carried to shore in the summer months, if the water particles move up and down or diagonally. The woman glows in the light pushing through the first blush of clouds. She tells her dog to follow her back to the car. My ears warm in the sun, and for a minute I hear my name whispered behind my shoulder in your voice. I wonder who will outlive who.
I take a position as a volunteer at the Clyfford Still Museum. I sign up for gallery walks every other weekend to fulfill my required time commitments and walk the small museum of Still paintings for two hours, noticing how the concrete archways impact the way one might view a quadrant of canvas. A bolt of periwinkle across a puddle of gold, a crimson fan in a quiet room. Walking in circles, I observed the corners of each painting, scrutinizing. Trying to name a color exactly. Ochre, juniper, mulberry, slate. I was amazed when I discovered that most of Still’s paintings were done with a palette knife. All that space covered with a tiny, metal triangle.
Roni Horn has curated the space for the current exhibition I’m walking though. In a video reel playing in one of the gallery rooms, Horn speaks about her interest in repetition, in photographing the same thing over and over. Many of Still’s paintings, too, repeat. The verticality over and over. I wonder if you are running across the Williamsburg Bridge now, again, your legs vibrating as the J train comes through, your exhalations moving in and out of the structure’s red axles.
I fall for you again, when we lay down in Sol LeWitt’s Five Modular Units. I think a plaque near the sculpture encouraged us to. Or maybe we just did it ourselves. Our feet fan out, sunlight on our shins. From the earth we look up, gazing at the same point. The painted aluminum beams cut through the blue sky, crushed with cumulus clouds. An oak tree bends towards us. We take too many pictures. The tops of our arms touch. You smell like fire smoke and rose petals. The grass wet and warm beneath us.
PH-247 closely resembles a larger, royal blue canvas that the abstract artist Barnett Newman painted around the same time in the 1950s. Newman named his paintings. The blue in Cathedra is split by a singular, white line, slightly off center. The stark line is impeccably straight and clean. An echo of the line floats on the right side of the canvas. Art critics have asked who painted the big canvas velvety blue first, Still or Newman.
In 1997, Newman’s canvas was slashed with a small knife by Gerard Jan van Bladeren at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He was looking for another of Newman’s paintings, Red, Yellow, and Blue III but when he couldn’t find it in the museum’s galleries he settled on slashing Cathedra. The gashes run horizontal, each fray of the canvas like a vein of the painting pulled out and left to be stitched back.
Today, it’s widely agreed upon that Still was, in fact, the first artist to explore “Color Field Painting”, this distinct type of abstract painting.
Underneath the lake ice is dim water. I imagine where the ice is thick, the cold creates a stillness that phytoplankton and zooplankton somersault in and out of. Collisions we can’t see.
We’re heading back to Brooklyn. We wait for the train. There is a large barbecue nearby and parents roll up to the platform with strollers packed with diapers and napping children. We are buzzed on cold brews and beer. You take a picture of me with my sunglasses upside down on my face. We laugh for too long about this. The kind of funny moment between two people that no one will ever think is as funny as it was for the five minutes when you both had to catch your breath.
Finally, on the train ride back, we share earbuds again and listen. I fall asleep on your arm. I like how your arms are longer than mine. How you are taller than me. It makes me feel protected by you. It makes me feel safe, the flesh below my skin, hushed. When I wake, I see a puddle on the platform outside the train window formed by a drip in the station’s ceiling.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the doctrine of signatures was a western text used for medicinal and divine healing. The writings of Christian mystic, Jakob Bohme, spread the signatures across the west. He suggested that God marked plants with signs and signatures that indicated how they might relate to our body and offer healing. The silky fluffed seeds of milkweed stimulate lactation in new mothers, walnuts treat brain and head related injuries, the fine needle hairs on stinging nettle treat stemming hair loss, the heart shape leaves of a linden ease grief.
The doctrine of signatures is a hermeneutic text filled with intricate pictures of flowers and roots and palms and eyes. Hand-written marginalia floats on the edges of each page, a continual conversation between plants and bodies. According to the text, the lily of the valley looks like scattered breath. The tiny buds, each an oxygen, were considered a heart medicine to help blood circulate, to help ease the tight chest of a broken heart.
We get back to Brooklyn and continue to drink. We write a poem together, folding a piece of paper like a fan as we alternate writing lines. The poem is about street lamps and longing. I would like to kiss you. I think that you would like to kiss me too. After another round, I walk you home under the damp, tangerine light. We pass a lichen tree with a silver bracelet hanging off a branch. Two purple pigeons coo under it’s small canopy. Wishful orange lifts above the lanterns.
We hug, holding a goodbye.
Nowadays, the lily of the valley’s roots and dried flower tips are used for various medical purposes, including paralysis and irregular heart beats. Another Easter in St. Louis, I continued to pick bundles of the delicate flower, pulling off their white cups, lining them up in rows held by blades of grass. Lily of the valley doesn’t make a particular sound when it burns. The lithe flowers just fade to ash in a fire’s crackle.
Amongst many of the workers at the museum, it’s widely agreed upon that his second wife, Patricia, is responsible for the creation of Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado. Still was careful with making sure that his collection was kept together and only shown in one museum. This request is written in his will. Still rarely showed his work during his lifetime, keeping it close and together, intact and collected, until after his passing. The museum in Denver houses nearly the entirety of his collection. Only a few alternative art spaces house Still paintings outside of Denver because while living, Still would sometimes sell a painting here or there to have money to live off of.
There are many photographs of his paintings taken at his farm in Maryland. This helps the archivists track the dates and times of the paintings. After Still made and photographed his work, he’d somewhat haphazardly seal the surface of the painting with a clear resin. Then he’d roll the canvases up and keep them in tubes, sometimes labeling the tubes with pictures that matched the paintings, sometimes not. He wanted his work to be revealed in the space it would end up in after his death. But Patricia was the one who meticulously kept record of the paintings, the tubes, the photographs.
I build small friendships with many of the security guards who walk the gallery with me. Endo, the guard who works the night shift, tells me he’s heard Still’s ghost playing piano in the galleries. I ask him if he’s ever heard Patricia, or Still’s first wife, Lillian. He says no, no he hasn’t.
He hasn’t seen Patricia’s ghost dancing across the first floor of the museum, making sure Still’s typewriter is clean and his letters are in order. He hasn’t seen the books in the archive office, Blake and Wordsworth and Woolf and Baldwin turning over their pages without a hand. The invisible spills of purple and yellow paint thrown across concrete walls. Patricia and Clyfford kissing each other’s fingers.
The next time with you is back in Denver when you and Em help move me across the country to Michigan. We all drive over a thousand miles in the worn seats of my Honda. Corn and soy stretch with the sky. You have a new boyfriend. I’m starting graduate school.
We smoke cigarettes on the breakwall our first night in Marquette. There are several lighthouses nearby. I have never seen a lighthouse before. At night the lake catches spills of light drifting under the moon. You cook dinner for me and Em. We play the 36 questions to fall in love. You tell me what you see beneath me.
We share a bed that night in my new room. A queen mattress on the wood floor. Pastel-floral paper covers the dim walls. A soft breeze moves through the bare room, filled with my books and piles of clothes I still need to organize. Shut-eye, facing each other, your hand begins tracing parts of my body. Outlines little centers. But I pretend to be asleep.
I pretend to be asleep because you have a boyfriend you will go back to in a few days. I pretend to be asleep because I don’t want to be an other woman again. I would like to kiss you in the daylight, on the train, near a wave. I pretend to be asleep for reasons I still don’t know or understand.
The next morning this all becomes a dream. A dream in which we pluck lilies and give each other bouquets. A dream in which we admit our love on the train in fanned poems before going backwards and sharing breakfast.
A year later, in Colorado for summer break, a lover shares with me that lily of the valley are invasive plants. I picture the six petaled tears I plucked when I was younger, strewed across the ground, planting seeds in new places. Taking over.
I picture twelve tears in my belly and throat, held by a streak of green watercolor.
The second summer after I begin volunteering at the museum, I come in off shift to watch the conservationist unravel a never-before-seen Still painting. Volunteers and staff gather around a large table with their cellphones out, ready to archive. The conservationist has a team helping him. They all wear special nitrile gloves, dental office blue, to protect the surface of the painting from fingerprints.
As they unroll the canvas, in this brightly lit and crowded room, pieces of forest green and earth yellow paint fleck off the unseen painting’s surface. The conservationist’s fingers and arms move in delicate sweeps, gesturing the ghosts in this canvas out. Several team members standby to collect the larger chunks of broken off paint into their palms. The volunteers and security guards film this waltz on their smartphones. The room is quiet except for the mumbles of the director and conservationist.
When the piece is fully unrolled, it becomes apparent time has bubbled parts of the piece, and the painting differs from the photograph pasted on the tube it’s been kept inside of. There is no blank white space on the canvas. The linseed oils have bled into one another, yellowing the bare parts of the canvas. The blue line in the center of the painting has a small green streak inside of it.
Near the end of my first year of grad school I am about to turn 30 and making another dating profile. I’m scrolling through my cell phone for pictures of myself, and it seems like every picture I have of myself, you’ve taken. On your last night here, on the fronch porch, you tell me you would like to photograph more. You tell me that you would like to break up with him. Explore your sexuality. I nod. I listen, listen. I hear the pitter of late summer rain and the crashing of Superior’s overwhelmed, swollen waves in the distance.
A ghost haunts the attic of this old purple home I will dwell in for three years in Marquette, Michigan. The ghost is a Swedish maid. In the middle of the night, on your last night here, I hear her footsteps as we lay side by side, arms touching. I want to tell you so many things I hold back. I want to tell you that I’m upset, and I still like you. I see the Swedish maid ripping the flowering wallpaper off the walls, cutting the fragile parchment into ovals shaped like organs.
In January, I walk out on the frozen bay. The ice is so thick and bright I cannot distinguish where the frozen bay ends and the clouds begin. Arctic wind bites my cheeks, hissing between my ears.
You sent me a letter last week. Along with a glittered lighter. Some hair clips. A pack of googly eyes. A bottle of lake essence from upstate New York. A handful of confetti.
I wonder if there is a confession hidden in the envelope. Or the warm particles from a lost kiss. I imagine the cheek of your hand gliding over the cardstock as you write “thinking of you.”
I text you a picture of me with the letter and the lighter, flickered on. I wait to hear something back.