In Memory of Connie Fox
Yesterday, Monica and I said goodbye
to a painter friend in hospice, a wonderful woman
in her late nineties, who first came out here to the far
eastern edge of Long Island in 1979 with her
expressionist friend, Elaine de Kooning, whose husband,
Willem, rode his bicycle past her house every morning,
calling, “Good morning, Connie, best of luck!”
where she met her husband, the sculptor, Bill King,
each obsessed with ripping the unspoken out of the known,
the astonishing out of the everyday, the symphonic out
of each trembling breath. Having suffered a stroke,
she could now speak only in song, and with her daughter, Megan,
we all held hands and sang “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,”
a song she sang to Megan as a girl. After kissing her goodbye,
my wife and I walked along the ocean, under the same red umbrella
she opened in her paintings, and I wished I could’ve thanked her
one last time for all those afternoons in her studio, revelation
dancing from floor to skylight, color trembling inside
whirling squares and sumptuous rectangles, her playing the fiddle
and Bill the piano at our sons’ birthdays, her echoing laughter — yes,
thanked her for introducing me to myself, the man hidden inside
his own hours of light and ecstatic wings, thanked her for her gift
of passion for what lives on the edge of things. Yes, now paradise
will be seen the way it was meant to, one edgy red umbrella at a time.
Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize winner who lives in East Hampton, has a new poetry collection, “Enormous Morning,” coming out from W.W. Norton on March 10. This poem, which will be included in it, previously appeared in the journal Five Points.