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On most mornings, as the sun comes up, I emerge from sleep, slowly kicking away sheets and blankets and floating up like a deep sea diver onto the surface of a new day. I’m still alive, I think, but I’m confused.

A dream, slowly fading away, resists comprehension: I see through the walls to the green hills on the other side of the bay. Trees and the moon and a puddle of water are invading the room. Oops, how did I change gender? I was a male when I fell asleep. The veiled figure is lovely. She wants to dance. Shall I?

My cat, who moments ago was black and the size of a panther, says, “Yes, Yes, Yes!”

We could read everything literally: a quiet room, leaves and tangled branches in a garden outside, a sculpture of a woman on a mantlepiece, a table with a plate and a glass of wine, a hanging lamp, two empty chairs, a landscape painting, an armoire with mirrors, a woman on a bench, sunlight pouring through stained-glass windows over floor tiles and walls, saturating the room, like colored air.

When I painted this scene as realistically as I was able to, I hoped that the literal might open a bridge into the imaginal: Are birds singing in the garden? Why are there chairs for two people when the table is set for only one? Is the plate as empty as it seems? Is the hidden woman a young girl? Perhaps she’s old and her hair is white. Is the wine poured for her, or for someone else? Does the sculpture of the woman on the mantlepiece see anything we cannot? If she could speak, what would she tell us?

For those not paying attention, Winter passed into Spring a couple of days ago. Or so sayeth the Gregorian Calendar. (As we well know, Nature often has other plans.)

I was going to try to write something profound about blossoming lilacs, longer and warmer days, chattering birds, et cetera, but it likely would have turned into a lot of blarney.

Maybe it’s better to just look at an image of water and light and to paraphrase a poem by David Ignatow:

We should be content
to look at a river
for what it is
and not as a comment on our lives.