This page is for Jay DeFeo. After dental work she can barely afford even with cash from teaching extra classes, she takes the bridge out of her mouth — paints it  "my model / out of my own head!" — a landscape like the Oakland hills, stunned cluster of late summer blackberries. The canvases look like September smells at night, dry grasses gold in the dark, fine yellow dust sifting up from my steps. What I like best

                                                                    the construct-
                                                                    destruct feature 

                                                                                  from abstract 
                                                                                  to representation  
             
                                                                    no one can say 
                                                                    moved linearly

                                                                                  (or 
the first chance 
to see a Johns retrospective I decline. Instead I spend afternoons in the DeFeo show hung opposite his. Alone with The Rose I bask in its auratic stature & want to stay with Jay, who toughs out years of poverty, bad teeth, worse luck, sexism, & her own character. Six years of paint, stellar rays troweled into two thousand pounds of stony glow spiked with mica: I let them comfort me. Somehow she draws even in hospice, swinging as always between monumental & microscopic, her final still lifes a pink ceramic cup. A friend's gift. The work like the life 

                                           not perfection

                                           but the inevitable

                                           form of the idea