Jasper smiles out loud, lips as silky as the long-grained cotton once raised on coastal plantations near Edisto. He laughs like he holds secrets no one finds funny, a code anchored in change, the shift of sand between tides. He claps with one hand at each map he paints. How does a cartographer locate a sandbar with exactitude? Errant geography sinks ships.
So the painter bends oils on a textured surface after first shooting an arrow. He draws the shaded bullseye around the point of impact then adds concentric bands of the spectrum, finally titling his target. A movement births and plants a flag, stabs the fiction of permanence.
Canvas stretchers litter the floor of his studio, incomplete of mission. Quantum possibilities appear, then disappear like inductive funhouses. What lasts? Not Bob, not the risk of love in the Republican ‘50s.
So much loss, number the ways. The stench, dispersed by a breeze off the Atlantic, of charred oil on the burnt cloth of inspired labor. The wind lifts the flag and twists the stripes around its 48 stars.
Merce and John visit and search the residue of a note once tapped on a keyboard, a fossil in the eardrum. Mycology ensues, they hunt for fungi in the wood chips below the moss that waves from Carolina live oak limbs. Fruit appears, then vanishes like rests in a score for piano as John composes the distinction between varieties of amanitae, psylocybes and Chicken-in-the-Woods. They picnic on the beach and throw I Ching, scratch hexagrams in the sand at low tide. Merce dances until no runes remain among the soaked flotsam of egg cases and horseshoe crab shells.
Bob’s kiss flies at half mast.
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