Painting and Poem

Time had to be mined from the painting, the delusion
of stillness was so powerful in it.
Gem or magma, motion seemed frozen up,
enthralled, below its surface: the two friends
in a mild late summer evening. Their hands
have just quit touching. One of them will go
in a white skiff at their feet, out past the headland
with its cylindrical temple in the middle distance.
The woman they both love is not portrayed
except as the golden sunrise or more likely
sunset to which all lines recede, the mouth
of shadow spilling light for now. Also the light
comes from them, is the fount of their eyes and sex
turning west. I had to read the painting
a long time to see the poem it kindly entraps
to redeem words from fury and small time.
First I imagined it hanging on a wall in a train
that raced to collision decade after decade,
never colliding, till it became antique.
The wood of the old coach and the ties rotted,
the engine and the rails rusted away,
the railroad slumped into earth, and then the painting
remained alone hurtling ahead, a tattered
scrap of bygone taste. And why imagine a train,
I thought next. Just by hanging in the world
the painting rushes ahead. Its mild regretful
stasis of a perfect late afternoon,
warm, dry, and soft, in a rich temperate land
that everyone remembers, even if he’s never known it…
it’s so much like those pauses where the struggle
to prosper or just survive can’t matter. As if we’ve died
and judgment has been in our favor, we’ll be allowed
to re-begin our failed attempts forever
without injury, in hope. In the painting’s form,
all this is plunging into the blank before us.
An invisible haste, an unvarying acceleration
carries it to wreck or erode in the wind.
And so there’s nothing mild in the mild image.
Words scream out of it. A claim, a wound of sound,
a sacred desperation in defeat,
thickens but oozes, never quite scabbing shut,
in the image, the unstable crust. And someone
repeatedly comes to watch and fastens the word
beautiful to the fact that blood escapes
so slowly here: the wild and vengeful thing
longing to be stopped. Desired this way,
visited so faithfully, it grows familiar
and in his dawning knowledge forms a picture,
the forgotten face of a once promised love.

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A.F. Moritz‘s most recent book of poems is The Sentinel (House of Anansi Press, 200)