Fast Canal and Nothing Is Only Itself.

A 9x12 pastel drawing.

Below is an excerpt from the poem "Camouflage" by Lawrence Raab.

... Reality, Walker Evans said,
is not totally real ...
... If reality
isn't totally real, how real is it?
In an old anthology of poems, beside a line
about the wind rising over water and the dark
engulfing the trees, somebody's written:
Ah, too true! A sigh: truer than merely true.
Sadder than a fact. And this person
needed to write it down in the margin,
as if to tell me, leafing through
that book as a boy, what I didn't know.
Wind breaks the water's surface.
Evening falls. Nothing is only itself.

"Nothing is only itself."   When I encountered that phrase I thought of Matisse painting his still lifes and odalisques, searching for 'true painting'.