REMAINING SILENT The facts

Sometime in 1985, I sit at a table in a college library among tall metal shelves, gray or green, that squeak if you lean against them or slide a heavy book across the horizontal rims, a rinse of dust always in the air. I’ve pulled out a large art book, its pages spread before me. To my left, plate-glass windows open on swathes of green, trees, granite buildings.

I’m intrigued by Camille Pissarro’s paintings, his pointillism and the indeterminacy that technique creates. Shapes shift and merge as I bring my face closer, then further back from the glossy plate glued to a heavy paper page. The plate depicts a sunny field through which a path is trod into a wooded area in the background. Where the path bends are two men and a pony, their features completely indistinct; blobs of paint signify faces, clothes, hats, hands. The pony has a saddle. The title, “Chemin Sous Bois, en Ete,” a path through the woods in summer. My mind flickers between “chemin” (path) and “chemise” (shirt). “Bois,” je bois, I drink: trees to paper to straws. Ete reminds me of etre, to be.

Indeterminacy. I’m observing something basic about language, but the flicker between words in my mind, the deliberate blurring of paint in the represented image, all this has a visceral tug from my throat to my gut. I need to walk that path into the wood, and yet I’m afraid because that path is blocked by two men and their little horse.

I explain to my advisor that I’d like to study pointillism and impressionism, look at the originals hanging in museums in Europe because images of paintings don’t show brushstrokes, and the colors are often slightly off. I want to write poems about paintings. Ekphrastic, the professor suggests. Yes, a good word, the guttural “kuh” making a handle on either end. I hand him the poem I’ve drafted about the Pissarro painting from the library. He tells me to speak to the dean about a postgraduate fellowship.

In the dean’s office, her hair crimped and gray, the room unlit because light comes dimly through a window by her desk, I try to explain why the college should approve my application for a Fulbright. This dean