To love and live with a painter means marveling at the space between the things they see that you cannot see, that they then make. White canvas, blank walls, his vision.

It is genuinely shocking to be jolted out of the world of our common culture into the world of our different worlds, and rituals around death and dying. He is no longer here as the ultimate medium or translator, the one who selected what mattered. There is only unalloyed culture, and no one to negotiate the treaties.

Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.

I wonder if these memories are finite, which is why I keep writing them down. The basket of remembrance has three sides; one is open; can it tilt and spill out?

In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.

Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always kno

One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR,

How much space for remembering is there in a day? How much should there be? I think about this in my poetry. I don’t want to be a nostalgist. Yet I feed on memory, need it to make poems, the art that is made of the stuff I have: my life and the world around me.

As I sit alone with these words, I think about how brave he was in so many ways, and how brave he was to go into that studio every day with his demons and his angels, and labor to put them on canvas.