Clouds Clearing Over Delft (After Jan Vermeer)

The winter of 1995-6 the National Gallery of Art hosted the amazing, wondrous Johannes Vermeer exhibit; I remember waiting in line in the cold, during the government shutdown (after the Republican Congress and then-President Clinton couldn't agree on a budget). I started this not long after, finished it much later, in unrhymed 11-syllable lines.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Clouds Clearing Over Delft (After Jan Vermeer)

You come as you come to any painting first
with a gift to leave outside the frame – a loop
of string, two coins, half of a tale overheard
this morning on the train – as you come newly
into a city holding tight the useless
and precious alike, yet unknowing the one
from the other – guidebook and well-twisted map
you struggle to match with unmarked streets that turn
to blind alleys or vistas to stop your throat.

Knowing enough to tell right from left, to know
the sea by the taste of the wind at sunset,
the green creaking weathercock coming about.
Enough then to see it as a town and not
a half-chewed blur out the train window, a stack
of bricks piled against grey hills, the raw scrape
of the painter’s knife and its mathematics
balancing absorption and ungathered weft,

as the gleam of morning sun twice-reflected
off sea-water mist unhurriedly reveals
a mossy-hulled ship still asleep at anchor
in Delft harbor.
                             That view is no more, perhaps
was never. Timbers interpreted may sway
as much as tides or children. At your own
back some ship, not this ship; among your
habits some city, not this, never this light.

Coming back that night the same way you started,
you reproach yourself for missing it before:
a shop window spills gold and garlic butter
onto the sidewalk, then is banished, an abrupt
snap of a hidden switch. In the sudden cold,
you press your face against the window to see
yourself at dinner days away, severing
time and mussel shell; raise your glass and smile back.

Remember this in the exhibition hall,
as the press of viewers threatens your memory
with stories of breakfast and the government,
threatens what you would hold fast by your brochure.
Your tokens have been taken up in the flare
from Nieuwekerk's steeple, forging gold from lead,
lifting red earth to press back the sea. Now, as
the clouds give way to morning's uncovered head,

hoist up your basket. Look here, the day begins.

(Published Cream City Review, Vol. 29 no. 1, Spring 2005)