L’Heure Mauve

L’Heure Mauve

Maya Venters

After Ozias Leduc

There, where the forest meets a winding road
bordered by broken pines and power lines,
the painter — turning to another day,
another season — walks the edges of 
the scene. He stops. He props his canvas, blank
against the bleak sky, and prepares the palette 
with undertones of past and present mixed 
into each hue. He lays down light and shade,
attenuated by the twilight hour. 
     Mauve touches everything: the snow that melts 
into the growing trickle of a stream,
pale dogwood rising in-between the fallen
fence posts, a rotting ladder left behind. 
Black bears strip bark from off of conifers 
as gris-de-lin clouds hide the sun from view. 
And as a tree that bends its crown from days 
weighed down by coatings of thick ice, so did
the glory-of-the-snow curl their soft heads 
while breaking through the ground to fleck the land. 
     The hour of mauve drips down through time. It bleeds 
into the soil and soaks through variegated 
leaf litter stacked above the umber earth. 
Another painter stands beside the road 
in the empurpled dusk. He parts the pine 
straw, then he rolls away a stone. And there,
a toad is coming back to life in spring:
it jumps into the air, it starts to sing.

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Maya Venters
Poet & Artist

Maya is a Canadian writer and artist. She is an MFA candidate at the University of St. Thomas (TX), where she holds a Scanlan Fellowship. Maya has published in The Literary Review of Canada, Modern Age, and The South Shore Review, among others.

Painting by Ozias Leduc