Notes on Ada Lea’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece”
There’s a haiku I read once: Moon, plum blossoms, / this, that, / and the day goes.
I can’t always tell the difference between music and poetry.
In the photograph, the musician leans a paintbrush to a wall-sized canvas. Clowns, troubadours, peppermint skyline. Shadows watch from the wall. At night, she writes poetry and Paul Celan turns 100. This is the world I want to live in. I want to sit at an old friend’s kitchen table and gaze at music’s moon. Where all is wanted (even the hard things), and the guitar belongs saucily in your lap.
The record sleeve holds a secret: toward the end, i had no choice but / to take a cloth to my reflection and / erase myself from myself.
The air that was blank to begin with is now crossed with a world that holds your gaze: a baby blue mini-fridge, Bob Dylan’s haircuts, everything under the sun perfect at its core, someone singing that is just the wind. The sentences swim in the pond, burst from fountains.
I mishear “this chair, this window” as “this chance window”—and I like it. I too have found a window I did not expect in this album, and reverently I pull up my poet’s chair.
The cuckoo sings / to me, to the mountain, / to me, to the mountain.
— Sarah Burgoyne is the author of Because the Sun (Coach House Books, 2021), Saint Twin (Mansfield Press, 2016), and Mechanophilia (Anvil Press, 2023), an infinite collaboration with American poet Vi Khi Nao.
You can read Sarah Burgoyne's poetry in Issue 307 (Spring 2026). Order the issue now!
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