|
In this painting there's a boy standing beside me —
once there was a kind of flagpole in the distance
before the boy absorbed it with his own javelin-body and darkened face.
Behind him an empty window bright with kitchen,
silver gleam half-open to the night and the boy is smelling pie —
should it be pie? With his white fingers he cuts a slice.
He doesn't notice me brushing my hair behind him.
Perhaps fifteen years he hasn't tasted this light
through his mother's window, and now he watches
as she moves along the row of shutters,
an opaque pain in his tongue, as if he swallowed
a whole town: one steeple, one museum, one bear in a cage.
I'm asleep in the painting where the boy
takes a half-step toward the mother and she says
look out where you're going.
Seeing him stumble, I imagine the portrait where he doesn't wake up.
She weeps, or I hope she weeps.
I think of her as the kind of painting you'd hang near a piano.
Here we are, the wind calling with a dream and a funeral —
does it matter where I place the flowers?
Things finish without us, even days.
How to live unembarrassed about this?
How to remember that the canvas is always silent
among the other faces, the other positively human things?
Here the mother speaks of these windows made beautiful
despite fading, despite the simplicity of perspective.
She leans from the window, now yellow, now green with dusk.
This is, after all, merely a rib showing through skin,
quite legible. This is my own window.
I know the paint loves me as one loves some confiscated thing,
an eye to a sharpened stick, dullness creeping upon us like a jungle.
Where is the blame in brushing one's hair for the portrait?
Only later I'll remember there's a kind of forgiveness
among turpentines. Then, it is best to go home.
|
