Woman Looking at a Table Diane

Through the grid of the glass windowpanes the woman looks in at a table filled with the debris of a meal. A glass of wine, unfinished. Bread torn to pieces as if fought over. A cheese in its rind, a heavy cloud of butter on a plate, half a pear, and a black-skinned ham, mostly intact, but enough sliced away to expose the white layer of fat and the bone, a strange, phallic-looking thing visually linked to the blade of the knife, which points to it like an arrow. The woman looks in, hungry-eyed, her fingers visible on the window ledge. Her face is odd, sleek like a deer’s with a deer’s archaic smile on her lips. Maybe her mouth is watering but I don’t think so. I’ve looked at her gaze with my magnifying glass and I think she is looking at me, coveting my chair. I believe she wants in to the picture-plane, then through it, to sit where I’m sitting and to paint the scene as she sees it, maybe a lone intact pear on a naked table, or the wine in the glass, to practice rendering transparency. Maybe she’ll turn the ham to hide the gristly bone, or ignore the ham entirely. Or she’ll paint just the grid of the window with no blue-eyed woman looking in. Each pane of glass will hold its own measure of the night and a fingerprint or two. At the bottom of the canvas, signed with a flourish in the lower right corner, her name, whatever it might have been.

Rebecca Hazelton