The Painting Above the Sofa

 

After all the years it's been there,
they must be tired of it, too--
weary of walking forever
down the same curving street,

past those buildings with their roofs
at impossible angles,
and always in the same
turquoise-tinged light.

That flower stall will never sell anything
but dry, withered blossoms.
That man, half-glimpsed
in a hurried brushstroke,

will always be a stranger,
foreign and alone.
Those strolling couples must dream
of the road opening up before them,

to a stretch of desert dunes, perhaps,
a field of blazing poppies,
a gilt-leafed forest of old,
a seaside holiday scene,

or at least another street,
some other shop to pass by,
and the hope of some new corner
that they've never turned before.

 

 

Conviction

 

I walk among the silent herd.
They chew cud, staring
at nothing. My hands
go through them when I reach to touch.

The fields beyond are dotted with them, their ghostly backs
cream and dun against the green.
They do not remember the slaughterhouses.

I have taken them in, consumed them,
and I cannot hear
the sounds I expect: contented murmurs,
soft thuds of hooves, rhythmic chewing.
Instead,

meat sears and hisses,
fat sizzles and smokes
when they turn their empty eyes to mine,
and for all my heart, I am hungry.

 

 

Construction

 

How slowly they're working,
this pair of earthmovers in the empty field,
their long shovel arms praying-mantis poised.
This must be, then, not a project to complete,

but a kind of Zen garden on a larger scale,
because the whole of their progress seems to be
in making new sets of tracks in the nearly-level ground,
never reaching perfection, but gaining
patient wisdom in the process--

that, and farther away,
the red fire hydrant in the clay-brown earth,
like a flower deciding whether or not to grow.

 

 

Polar Bear Eating Vanilla Ice Cream
in a Snowstorm

 

Stare at the blank page
and wait for something to arrive.
Anything.
Remember those little-kid jokes,
how an empty white sheet of paper

was actually a picture
of a polar bear in a blizzard,
and he was eating ice cream,
and it was vanilla ice cream
so it was all white--

but you see him now,
his pink tongue licking the bowl clean,
his massive paws,
the way he lifts his head
to sniff the air,

and the way he looks at you
as the ice floe he's standing on
drifts away
and all your half-formed ideas
fade to white.

 

 

One Answer

 

In the dream, I am holding
a thick hardcover book called
Does Poetry Matter?
over my head as
four- and six-inch diameter hailstones
slam into the ground around me,
and I think,
"Well, yeah, in this case, I guess."

 

--Renee Carter Hall

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