Scraped Bald

Painted after my first winter in Maine, after a chilly spring visit to the summit of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park, which overlooks Bar Harbor and the Porcupine Islands in Frenchman Bay. It inspired the following poem.

Another Painting, by Joan Vienot
It hardly seems fair, living for the better part of seven decades
A full life, fully living, in places where others slave and save just to visit.
Counting forty-two years on a beach in Florida, white sands, tropical colors,
And now, today, stepping lightly to leave no trace on this Maine mountaintop,
Stepping so carefully on hard-as-steel rock-hard rock.
The mountain requires respect.
Standing up in the back seat of this pink Cadillac, a strong wind stinging my cheeks,
Freezing fingers holding my coat closed.
My windy watering eyes might have seen a blurry family of porcupines
Waddling across a puddle below.
The corner turns for another vast view, more pink granite with gray weathering,
The fading echo of volcanic rock being scraped by glacial ice through the eons,
And now krummholz whistling over bluets and blooming blueberries,
Serviceberry, rhodora, lime-green replacing grayed sienna.
And then descending, traveling through a photo calendar,
Forty-two becomes four hundred twenty, four hundred twenty million years
To realize the dream of an ideal life,
This life, another life for me, this another place, this another time, another painting.