“‘Landscape with Snakebite’ imagines a non-existent Peter Doig painting derived from his Pelican series, in which a figure borrowed by the artist from a found photograph turns up in a variety of contexts. I am smitten by Doig’s palimpsests and recursive returns to subject matter in evolving and variable sites.”
Stands in a dugout canoe,
won’t talk.
Matted hair, stringy beard,
cloth-wound skinny hips.
Everything hot and loud,
dripping with painted sweat.
The river dark
under overhanging trees.
High insect chirr.
Low slupp pah-slupp on the pole.
Stares right past me—
no, through.
(Upstream, I heard, a bushmaster
bit the leg off a quarryman.
People have died of less.)
(At night, flying over,
the quarry gleams
like a rare and enormous orchid.)
Where did he come from?
When did he appear?
