Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Spring Garden"

Because our rigors of love and lust had so much starlight
in them in the early Aughts, it was easy for me to see, many
years later, that Mary had tired slightly against all demonstrative
physicality. There was less she was in the mood to do, and what
she did was less involved and less generous. It felt, often, as
though she were withdrawing from life in general, interest by
interest, piece by piece. The last conflagration of energy went
into painting The Fall. Once that had been accomplished, the sense
was that she manifested as a completely privatized person. In
other words, she did not manifest. All the totems of our marriage
were left to me. Towards the end, I had taken her on the road.
She met the poets in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Boston. What she
made of the other Mary was uncannily about a resemblance which
made me laugh up close. Mary from Boston was retreating by that

time, too, as a major recession moved in on the United States. All
of us in the late Aughts flailed around resource-piles which began
to disappear. Mary’s co-op studio in Spring Garden, where I posed
nude for The Fall, was the site of no cocaine madness, sexualized
histrionics, or any delinquency. Mary’s family had kicked the shit
out of her. In a way, it was better. She was more deliberate about
what might amount to her final artistic statements. Cocaine buzzes
had made her careless. Except, now she had to feel all the painful
emotions the cocaine used to pleasurably, luxuriantly numb. There
was no escaping that her painting life was a long, slow road. Several
floors up in Spring Garden, as she had been in her PAFA studio,
and with the grunge of North Philadelphia beneath her feet, she
found time to tame, demystify my naked body, the body of Adam,
for herself. He was David, too. But he wasn’t Jesus. Or even close.

© Adam Fieled 2026