Looking out at Constable’s distances,

nothing I wanted to be, what I am.

He grows on you, Constable, so childish

at the beginning, toy farms, slow pastures,

the small trees bundled up as if for sale,

everything schooled out and diminished in

the direction of Salisbury—or

is it Dedham?—1804, thirty,

and already decades behind Turner.

History is easy. I could write all day

dropping names into the spaces between.

Most of C’s best oils are on paper or

are drafts of pieces that get too finally

finished, even the very great ones

on which his fame, as we like say, “rests.”

Please look at his A Cart with Two Horses,

1814, workhorses of course, one

posed in profile, the other turned toward

the back of the painting, sold privately

cheaply, like most of his work. Millionaire

Turner evolves into near abstraction,

asking light to be sunlight purely, fire

from within nothing but what he calls a

landscape. Besides, he traveled, an antique

traveler in antique lands. But I love C’s

local Study of Tree Trunks, with a figure

beside them, more oil on paper, seven

years after Horses. Constable’s aging.

He thinks I’m a cloud, a long white body

lying in the air over Hampstead; he thinks

clouds of storm shapes are bodies, like great elms.

I’m his anomaly, still thinning out.

Another day he sees me lying down

undulant in the middle distance, the

cloud come at last to earth as the earth is

part of the corn, the good ground under corn,

the painting piecemeal, the way he paints, so

that you have to stand at a real middle

distance just to see me. Turner wants me

to be The Angel Standing in the Sun,

apocalyptic in the afterlife,

though I prefer my body as a field

in which I live over again as flesh—

or is it flush?—against a stream, or of

the stream, as C also sees me, where a

boy on a barge on canvas is taking

a cloud-white horse to its destination

far downriver. And I am the water.

And the light in the water. And if it

is possible, having also been of

the plowed and planted and replanted earth,

I am the sky domed over the boat boy’s

possible future, when he then arrives

and puts to work all that really matters.