Keeping Their Secrets

, originally uploaded by farmboyz.

Yesterday at the gym,I bumped into a friend who has booked his time in Fire Island. One of four bedrooms in a house of strangers.

His announcement made me look at this painting when I got home, remembering our garden in Provincetown and one week in which our three house guests went their separate ways, brightly chatting each other up at moments of intersection, keeping mindful of shared bathrooms, conspiratorially winking while quietly passing in and out of their bedrooms at odd hours, relentlessly pursueing distinctly private agendae.

I'd gather them together for the grilling of dinner in the garden after which each would spin away into a night visible perhaps to the neighbor's cat, but not to us.

During the day, they'd spend some time with me in that garden, speculating about whomever was absent at the moment, and receiving tending among the old roses that flowered that week. Tool in hand, I would indicate a set of trussed canes heavy with bloom, and I would announce the name of each one as if it were my rather brilliant child just returned from a Swiss boarding school. Dorothy Perkins, Fantin-LaTour and the Alchemist.

Stepping into the center of the patio, I would look up into the full sun and then back at my friends, now seeing only the golden outline of their flashing coronae as they announced their plans for the day before heading off to beach, book or bar. In the silence of their departure, I would again fill my eyes with sunlight, and looking back at the roses, I would find them drained of color and rocking thoughtlessly in the breeze.