Prompt: Your story is about an artist in 1984 forgetting names.
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I cannot, for the life of me, recall your name.
The swan frightens the bear away by spreading its wings, an uppercut of white that is full of imperial bone. I am finding it most difficult to paint the feathers—the intimate detail of barb, vane, crest. Feathers we used to collect together in Maine, which fell beside creeks attuned and always within in hearing distance, as the premonition of a mother. The feathers we found were the sorest proofs of a creation, and the prettiest among them signaled dusk, Indian passion, and by looking at the feathers of smoke-laked herons, I knew why the components of nature inspire spells, witchcraft, and potions—little pagan prayers that we could somehow control the beauty, or at least the fear of woods, which is never the fear of forests, but a fear of lost children, axes, horses between the trees that remember the death of a brother.
It is not even half done, and I have already had two offers on it, as it is.
The bear is heavy, a boulder of trout-gashed rapids, and whenever a bear is frightened, it breaks my heart, because I am certainly no braver than a bear and so what does that mean for us if we should cower at the wingspan of a swan.
This is not the first time I have forgotten your name.
The last time, there was a house on fire, and I was almost naked on the lawn at night. Because it was January, and because the ice factories were cutting away boxcars of up-country glaciers to ship on freighters to Panama, there was nothing for me to do but stand close to the house and keep from freezing in the dark until the fire crews came. I was convinced you were in the house, on the second floor, but I couldn't recollect your name to call it. It was on the tip of my tongue. I could taste it and it tasted like the feeling of good rope, snow beneath pine, unmanly wisteria.
I wanted a pentacle of flame, a heron's feather, and to call out your name like a spell or a devil.
The wood yearning, twisting, sawing aside like the horse for a bride.
I have painted a little wisteria, which is a flower beautiful for its trajectory and spillage, for how helpless and languid it is in its beauty, as boyhood infatuation.
The word escapes me. There is a word for this, but it is obscured by woods. It is a word used by sons, princes, twins. The swan beats water and the bear rears up like a barn-raising, the water is a burial with stones, you love the swan's neck, looping like the blood and the rope of a condemned man, but there is pity for the bear, too. I wish I was more Indian, so that I would have beautiful legends about bears and aspen, and the haughty swan, and perhaps the river, which holds the root of language and all names.
When it is finished, it will hang in a gallery.
In the woods, there is a lost child. But no one is lost unless you have forgotten their name, and cannot call it to startle the ground birds or listen for a response to it as red leaves rumble the pace of bears.
The swan is beneath the wisteria.
There is pity for the bear.
The house is good and warms even in death.
I am aware of life, and ice in Maine.
But it is hard to remember the name of something you have always wanted to lose.
