The Family Room revisited

The Family Room oil on canvas by Susan Ellenton 2004.

Propped in pieces in the corner fireplace my Dad built when I was six

the cast iron black lion seemed to say,

Don’t go there.

That room was never warm.

*

Exercising my imagination, I finally

told my husband last night, that’s what

I’m doing these days.

That’s what you did when you painted these,

he affirms, gesturing to our livingroom walls.

This morning I stand and turn, meeting my decades-old canvases:

The Gift, The Mermaid and the Shaman,

The Big Picture, The Watchers

- improvisations, I said at the time, I’m fascinated by

sensations of meaning arising and fading away -

and hanging in the corner of this house, the one I/we have made my/our own,

The Family Room: a rectangle of rectangles

slashed by an errant hockey stick

not aimed at, not watched by

the on-looker who is

somehow out of the picture but in it.

She gazes at

the forbidding fireplace. Opaque, impassable.

Tell that girl to stare the lion down. The only way out is the only way in. Through fire. Hers.