Nineteenth-Century Canvasses                              Hinsdale Bridge, September 2014   Constricted by their clothes but unencumbered by irony, they went to big places and painted what they saw, what they’d come to see — the long picture vistas, the face of God and America, real estate. And they worked big back then — chest-thumping mountains, laudanum skies, the beckoning gates of everything we didn’t know we wanted. They taught me to see this valley, tonight, the Connecticut. What natural law were they arguing, what hazards of light? Cole, Bierstadt, Moran — maestros of awe. If paint could sing, those canvasses would sing arias. But this — it’s not like anything.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont September 2014   (Appeared in Atlanta Review 23:1)