48” x 36”, oil on canvas

I have a cottage at Years’ End.

From my little scrap of hillside

I look down and see the past dividing

with a grief no-one understands.

But this past is another future,

this future another past.

During the Pain Not Bread years with Kim and Roo, Wang Wei’s ghost haunted me. Often I could feel his presence behind me. His estate in the mountains at Lantian, south of Chang’an, we imagined as being located not in space, but in time. Its site was not Lantian, but the year’s end. A line from Su Shi about grief has found its way into the poem, or into the painting. Here it is not a person, but the past itself, that is suffering this grief.