I imagine Mackie by water
especially here on Long Island
where I’m watching the little sloops so tender
they take a heel in the slightest breeze.
It’s just her kind of scene.
She could have sat right here beside me
making her sketches for the sailboat paintings:
all color and nothing too abstract.
This is the kind of brilliant day
we always had on the ferry to Victoria,
Mackie in black with touches of pink—
Arden pink lipstick and a fuchsia scarf.
All the way from Vancouver harbor
we’d draw the seagulls that wheeled and screamed:
the curve of their claws, the depth of web,
she with pastels and I with pencil.
Later we’d sit together on the beach
in the tall sea grass with a cobalt sky.
Mackie painted in watercolor, focused
on getting it all down right.
She would have loved
this bending grass at Greenport
and the stalks of heavy ivory flowers
each bud like a common lily
but opening in a huge Canterbury bell
with six precise petals pointing down.
And the sea roses blooming on the sand,
exactly her color, the fuchsia
of her silk scarf I sometimes take out
still with its faint scent of Blue Grass.
And the mockingbird nesting in the clump of cedar
who starts every riff with a seagull scream.