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The Mystery of Max Schmitt
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as ashes, flecks
of flesh,
papery breasts on a breeze, thighs
     pulsing upward
with red light, abstract hollows and dunes
once waists and hips . . . .

Knowledge of the human body, Eakins believed, was essential for the artist. By teaching his students how to paint the nude figure, he enables them to see themselves “with an eye naked as God’s.//Or as a doctor’s,” an aesthetic embodied in the best of Dacey’s poems, the scientific fully wed to the artist’s other half, the seer. Dacey, in portraying Eakins, understands that the artist who looks deeply into subject will discover there self as much as other, just as this artist who most carefully observes will see himself ultimately as part of the scape he paints. In “Thomas Eakins: The Badlands,” Eakins, on horseback, watches as a cowbird hops from his horse’s head to Eakins’ own knee; the bird reminds him — and us — why he has left Philadelphia: he has been dismissed from his position as Director of the Pennsylvania Academy School for using nude models in his classes, and is, as Dacey notes in the chronology, recuperating from the traumatic event:

The bird seemed to me a muscle with wings,
quick and compact and appetitive,
and I thought of the muscle in Philadelphia
the ladies did not want their daughters to see,
no bigger than a bird, its moves stitching
the seamless landscape of anatomy.

To Eakins, the bird behaves as if the human body were “as natural as the bird itself,” touching Eakins’ hand “as if it were but part of wide Dakota,/handscape a form of landscape, and neither a threat.”
     Eakins’ life, his ideals and disappointments, and his art, both what survives and what has been lost, compose a continuous circle into which Dacey draws himself and his readers. In the book’s final poem, “Coda: Painting Eakins,” Dacey writes: “I apply a word, here, there, step back, admire/. . .The face begins forming. Mine? The portrait as/self-portrait. I see him only in my light.” But this is a wonder, not a failure, of the artistic venture: painter, writer, reader — all are joined through that most human gaze, the artist’s single, and singular, vision. Whether on canvas or page, the artist’s creation is at once window and mirror, the horizon joining self to world. Through this book’s rich imagining of one artist, Thomas Eakins, what Dacey ultimately offers us is a thoughtful meditation on the nature of art itself, that most “intimate labor.”