Earth Tones
It’s a few minutes before eleven,
and the accomplished watercolorist,
whose paintings of the uneasy
relationship between nature and
the world built by humans are
suffused with an ironic detachment
that, depending upon one’s political
leanings, can be read as a love for,
or a loathing of, the suburban community
where she has lived for four decades,
watches the oblong shadow of a
neighbor’s satellite dish as it crawls
down an east-facing wall, slices through
a fingerprinted window pane and begins to
darken a patch of yellowed grass,
which is threaded with a handful of
last fall’s crinkled oak leaves
Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Bookforum, and many other publications.
See more of his work in 8.4