They Don't Know
The morning chose the chair.
White light lies along the backrest, the armrests, the legs – thin and exact, as if someone had drawn it downward and missed no edge. A plastic garden chair nobody bought for its beauty. This morning it is lit as though it mattered.
Its back to the yard.
It faces where the sun rises – behind the trees, at the far end of the yard. No one turned it this morning. Yesterday someone left it at that angle and never touched it again. It did not turn around. It simply stayed. And the morning came back from the same side and found it waiting.
Who sat here, to leave it still facing that way?
Shadows are not darkness. They are the night that hasn't finished leaving – long, thin, clinging to every object, holding its shape for as long as it still can. The chair continues into its shadow, the bowl into its own, as if a thing were only the part of itself you notice first.
They fall the same way. All of them. And all of them point back to yesterday.
Once the sun climbs higher, they will shorten. They don't know that.
The peonies are white and heavy, their blooms lowered into shade. They do not block anything. They let the light take the yard, as if they meant to arrive later – when the sun is higher and it is their turn to be its retinue.
The bowl is not waiting.
Blue in all that green, lit from the inside, louder than such a thing has any right to be. The morning never asked whether it deserved an answer.
The yard greets the sun the way objects do: by position, by shine, by what is turned toward what. Without a sound.
And all of them continue into their shadows – toward the side opposite the one they were waiting for.
Garden Solitude: Green Space, 2024
Oil on canvas, 19 × 29 cm · with passe-partout 30 × 40 cm