Louise Piper is former teacher of English now working as a freelance editor. Her writing has been curated in Strangely Familiar (chapbook of poems, Three Cups Curation); Alaska Women Speak (‘Flights of Fancy’ group of poems); Gathering In: Covid-19 Silver Linings (‘A Long, Long-Term Lockdown’ personal essay, WindyWood); Three Time Travelers Walk Into (‘The Greatest Trick’ short story, NY: Fantastic Books); and The Year I Lived With a Psychic (memoir, Amazon). She was shortlisted for the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s Rita Joe Poetry Prize in 2022, and she was a Helen Creighton Folklore Society Grants-in-Aid recipient in 2023.
“In ‘Resting Place,’ I explore the demise of a relationship through a narrator who, feeling dislocated, identifies with the subjects and themes in a range of artwork: in particular, she reflects on her closed nature as she studies Tracey Emin’s selfie photo, I’ve Got It All (2000); she is curtailed as she imagines herself in Salvador Dali’s Forgotten Horizon (1936); and she imagines herself to be the isolated subject in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942). More generally, she absorbs the abstract world of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (1919). Finally, there is also reference to an untitled Laura Knight painting when the narrator is considering the implicit power dynamics between subject and artist. Through my depictions and engagement with these artworks, I explore how artwork speaks to the self even as it depicts another. These artworks allow me to engage with ideas of openness and confinement.”
When I’m in downward dog with my eyes closed, I can imagine beneath a cemetery’s surface. It looks like a cityscape, with centuries-old layers of caskets appearing as skyscrapers and its deep pockets of skeletal remains, humps on the horizon.
Do you know some cities now offer recyclable graves? You rent your spot for a couple of decades then they evict you—yes, churn you up—and move in new tenants who are prepared to pay a higher rent.
I survey the kempt and the unkempt headstones. So many dead…so many more of us still to die. Where will we put these dead and their caskets, their urns, their legacies? Maybe, instead of trying to procure final resting places, we should admit what any of us have here—temporary lodgings.
I’m meditating in my partner’s expansive attic room. Light from the late morning sun radiates through the skylights, a voile fluttering, so that I imagine being wrapped in its soft folds making a heavenly ascension. I sit on the floor, my back against a stack of boxes, gazing at a mounted poster of Tracey Emin’s I’ve Got It All, a performance snapshot of the artist with flurries of banknotes swirling at her splayed legs. My attention shifts to my own body; my legs are double-crossed, first at the thigh, then at the ankle. Nothing to see here, I smile to myself.
Salvador Dali’s Forgotten Horizon depicts an expansive sky on a sparsely populated beach, conjuring a time when our lives’ vast opportunities are still miles in front of us. Some psychologists say that having sight of the horizon helps us locate a better sense of perspective, especially in challenging times. Back at my home, I think of the limited horizons in my paintings, depicting country peasants tramming along their own long and winding road, or else renderings of flowers in asymmetrical vases that preoccupy me uncomfortably. Bubble-wrapped, my collected paintings are huddled on my porch, finally to merge with my partner’s art collection after “living apart together” for ten years.
From my attic, I resurrect my grown children’s early masterpieces—cracked blobs of acrylic paint on yellowed and curling paper—unwanted by their creatives who’ve long left home. How could I run towards a new horizon clutching all this? I imagine Dali’s beach scene, see myself in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century impractical dress, gathering up damp, sandy fabric in one hand with rolls of memories scrunched under my arm, the other hand fluttering to my head to keep my hat in place.
There is an eerie echo in my kitchen from its bare countertops and ceiling, cleared of hanging pots and utensils. Empty hooks on a stainless steel rack sway slightly, the energy of decades of family activity still faintly pulsing in the room. The children’s discarded artwork crackles as I scrunch it into a black garbage bag.
I step outside to look for the horizon, but the familiar hills surrounding the valley close in on me.
It took Monet thirty years to paint the immensity that makes up his Water Lilies series. His trick was to lose the horizon to create the effect of complete immersion. I’m reading this on the day I move into my partner’s place, and I’m lost at the threshold of abstraction when there’s a creak and a thud as the ceiling above me ruptures beneath the weight of chimney soot. His house is plunged into a hellish greyscale. My seated outline on the floor is a crescent moon in a midnight sky and what used to be my angelic voile has morphed into flapping bat wings at the gates of hell.
Before my partner comes home, I sift through his abundance of photos, books, art, programs, pamphlets, ticket stubs, smeared with a grimy film of carbon, a manifestation of the decaying process. Wiping a frosting of soot from its frame, I gaze at the back of the head of a ballerina on canvas. A submissive pose or the ultimate act of defiance? It’s a Laura Knight; it likely belongs to a group of paintings depicting the off-stage life of ballerinas between performances. My partner told me he especially admires Knight’s renderings of elegant necks. At least the ballerina can’t see how perilously close to ruination the legacy of her graceful neck had come amidst the soot and stuff of our behind-the-scenes life.
Supper is a quiet affair. At our first dinner together living under the same roof, cutlery scrapes plates and his gaze wanders briefly to the boxes I’d brought in earlier. He returns his attention to his chocolate profiteroles, sweet and gooey, faltering his attempt to spoon out our clotted centre. Eventually, his spoon rattles in the dish as he asks, “Have we rushed things?”
A few months after I move in, I make my own way to his father’s funeral service. Even when it’s not your own, grief is a rip current, and you are sucked in by those deeper and darker waters. As I absently drive, I figure that I’m a skinny drainpipe for my partner’s grief, while he is a reservoir at maximum level, dangerously close to spilling, though still and contained for the time being.
I’ve been so preoccupied with the metaphysical realm of his grief that I arrive at the church without having envisaged my place in the actual ceremony. I’d lived the last few days entirely from his perspective: why he’d chosen the opening hymn; the reverential bow that he would take in front of his father’s coffin as he made his way from the pew to read the eulogy; the final prayer the vicar would make over the casket before his father was taken to his final resting place.
As I walk through the grounds of the church, I contemplate how many unmarked dead I’m stepping over with each dip and rise in the terrain, mimicking life’s rhythms. I’m reminded of the way I carefully trod over my still unpacked boxes that morning, languishing in a dip of impermanence. My tiny frame pushes open the majestic doors of the Anglican church.
Like a teenager past curfew, I creep to an empty space tucked toward the middle of the congregation, far away from my partner’s dark curls bobbing in discussion with his brother on the front pew. I look ahead to a window, needing sight of a Dali horizon—but the glass is stained, and I can’t see what lies beyond.
After the service, I navigate another subdued entrance at the wake, sneaking into a quiet corner of the room in a community hall. Small knots of relatives introduce themselves to me, determined to straighten out the purpose of my presence.
“Who are you, dear?”
Who isn’t asking themselves that existential question at a wake?
“His partner?” they gasp.
Others more quizzically probe if I’m sure about that.
“Lovely,” they answer, with a simper.
“We had no idea…. How long have you been together?…. Ten years?”
I’m rescued by the vicar who comes over to me with my partner in tow, his relatives dispersing as effortlessly as fizzled-out soda bubbles into the air. “So, who is this dear heart who has been left to her own devices for most of the day?”
I’ve churned up my life’s routines and possessions but I’m loose soil sitting on dense clay. A few days after the funeral, I collect my boxes together and stack them by the front door. Over the years we’d managed to hold onto olive branches. Now I’ve let go and in my mind’s eye, a branch trembles, and I watch my partner’s grip slip, so he loses his footing like he did that time he carried too many bags of groceries to the larder in the cellar. He trips at the top and clatters down the stone steps, managing to keep the bags elevated so that his ankles and hips take the brunt of the fall and not a single egg cracks.
But the effort to not crack eggs has become a strain and something portentous hovers, threatening to engulf the air once again. His fingers go to rest in a belt loop that became unstitched a long time ago. Remembering its absence, he attempts to hitch his jeans, grasping the worn denim in his fingers. Releasing it before there’s any sustained upward movement, he asks, “What will you do?”
I’m a subject in an Edward Hopper painting, probably Nighthawks, depicting a few stragglers coming together to have a drink, in an almost empty bar, while the rest of the city sleeps. I’m the girl in the red dress sitting next to a handsome guy. I want to feel the warmth of Hopper’s yellow and green hues, but I’m chilled by the sterility of the diner’s glass walls. I want to feel a connection in its light space; yet I can only see us together, but apart.
My heels would click on the ceramic tile as I leave the bar, my coat draped over my arm; he would trail behind me and fuss that I need to keep warm, but I would choose to shiver and walk alone under a midnight sky, and looking up, I’d observe the stars as a film of dust and see myself finally resting there.
As I lie on a beach, face turned towards the horizon, I contemplate how some of Monet’s landscapes were too large to frame. I sit up and uncoil my legs in a butterfly pose, my hands grasping my bare feet, knees flapping gently to loosen my hips, heat released from my crotch. In downward dog, the low tide paints a glistening-gold sky and dots of pink float behind my closed eyes, forming a blossoming Monet with a lotus wisdom: I am my life’s artist and there is everything to see.
