My photo of Desert Forms (Hughie Lee-Smith; 1957).

In March, during a visit to the Art Institute, I saw this painting in a way I think of as “again for the first time.” The plaque indicates that the artist “often situated enigmatic people in bleak landscapes,” a reflection of Lee-Smith’s experience as an African American. Earlier that month, I had reread “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (T.S. Eliot; 1915), and the painting evoked in me the same sense of depthless anxiety and loss the poem did:

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all….