a free-spirited mystical Catholic painter
she had long bony fingers
a drawling way of speech
she liked tomato-on-white-bread sandwiches
and chablis
she carried a little dog
had no interest in children
her cubist Mary
did not cuddle Christ.
Though my aunt since I was born
she didn’t notice me
until that soft summer
she sat at her canvas
working blue and magenta and dark dark yellow
and I hung behind her chair
long after the poppies had withered.
She was near 60
and I 22.

I felt wonder at her work:
the spirited silver trees
the mambo dancers
the yellow swamps

Then, last May, she died.
They buried her properly enough
in a coffin under concrete next to her husband
in the slumbering gulf town where they’d lived.
But in August the storm of storms
uprooted her alone
swept her seamless casket into the gulf.

Artistically assertive,
sophisticated
dangerously witty,
she was still a physically cautious woman.
She would feel disturbed by
such unorthodox travel,
much preferring a Lincoln on dry land.
I don’t know what to make of this.
No meaning comes
from this fragment of Katrina’s colossal story,
just sorrow.
The same unsettled awe
I felt for my aunt’s work
I now feel for her
still sailing the warm gulf waters,
now no longer the artist,
but the unwitting art.