Yellowed Clippings He mocks me with his past accomplishments. I turn the pages of the scrapbook Ruth has kept through years of triumph, hope, despair. The edges of the yellowed clippings curl as if the heat of words once written down have angrily consumed this record of the past. He sits behind a multi-colored magazine extolling Irish meadows green from sun, one eye on me, his other eye locked on a page he’s glanced at twenty times and more today. At last I sigh my resignation at his art. I shut the clippings back into their cage of red and gold leathered elegance. "One critic says you’re sweet as sap," I say He drops his Ireland on his lap and snorts. "Three days ago a woman at an Arts, Inc. meeting said the same," he said. "She said she was a sculptor too. As fat as walruses, she said she did reliefs with carpet squares. If that is sculpture, then I’m sweet as sap." "Well, Michelangelo was sweet sometimes," I say. "The great Pieta’s sweet in stone. The sadness smoothed into the mother’s face reflects the pain caused by the Christ’s cold peace." He clears his throat. "Your Michelangelo is muscle-bound," he says. "He’s like I was when I was young--all for the realistic line. When he was young he snuck into a monastery’s morgue and spent the wee hours of the night with dead men, cutting up their flesh to find the bone and muscle structures underneath their skin. He models more than sculpts. He had a skill. I can’t dispute that. Still, art’s more than skill." "You’re such a sage," I say. "You’ve got art down into a set of words that plunder through your years and fossilize all that you’ve got to say into an attitude unmovable and cold." He laughs, my barb pained in his shining eyes. "I’ve made mistakes," he barks. He thumps his chest. "My heartbeats falter with mistakes I’ve made." I put the clippings on the couch and stand. "Let’s go outside," I say. "We’re clashing tongues when we should be out tramping in the snow." He grabs his coat and hat as I grab mine. And as I watch into his eyes and face I suddenly become aware of some sweet radiance inside the way he moves his strong, square hands. "Your fawn is sweet," I say. "Its ears perk up toward the sky; the tension in its neck sweeps up into the liquid of its head; the muscles of its flank strain taut against the immobility of stone-carved eyes. Life’s sweetness perks into the tension built into the fawn’s incredible alert." He grunts, then walks out through the front-room door. The coming spring is formed as droplets bright with sun against the dark of maple bark. Icicles glisten hanging from the boughs of pine that trail in green platoons into the woods. We walk, the dying winter’s air sharp, brisk, a hint away from warmth and sun and spring. "The yellowing of age upsets your apple cart," he says. "The clippings represent accomplishments once known, now yellow/faint, forgotten, lost by everyone but you and Ruth and me. You’re wondering what all your writing means if it grows yellow as the years pass by." "Sweetness isn’t always rotten at its core," I say. "Nor is it all that far removed from life. Life’s sweet sometimes. Spring’s almost here." "In school they say that art’s immortal, strong," he says. "They’re wrong, of course. There’s politics in art, and fashion-thoughts that make an art out of the dribblings of a would-be artist’s mind. My stone is permanant. I give it form, and then that form begins to deteriorate into the stone’s last form as powdered dust." I stop. The ruts sliced in the frozen road make walking hard. Hands dominate Jim Gehr. They form his substance, square, strong, graceful, large. The days seem yellow in the waning light. The sun appears to burn into itself, consuming fire as droplets shine of scattered fire and icicles glisten as they melt away. "Then artists shouldn’t capture sweet, soft lives," I say. "They ought to line and mass decay and rail against injustice birthed in time. A walrus ought to do reliefs with carpet squares. The clipped accomplishments yellow anyway." He smiles. "You’re not so dumb," he says. "And I am not so sweet. I’m rotten to the core." I turn and walk back to the A-frame house. He stands inside a road rut, competent, benign, a comprehending air about his face.