The Empty Frame

after a painting by Evan Walters

It’s a photocopy of a printout of a photograph, now lost,

of a painting now destroyed. Step by step

we might think of it as progressively less there

the closer it comes to us, or of ourselves less

as seeing it here, on this page now, than as following

the story of its disappearance;

but here it is, intact and yet all ghost as well:

an empty frame propped up against a studio wall,

that interrupts the skirting board, the wallpaper,

that makes each flaw it finds into a pattern and each pattern

into a flaw: the bloom of musty damp along the wall

becomes Bohemia’s famous coast, miles of motorway

hard shoulder, or a frontier complete with watchtowers

and flags, barbed wire, guards and dogs.

A window into, a window out from, it is the frame

that makes the picture, the way the margin makes the centre:

the squared-off angle, the spirit-levelled, bevelled

edge that marks the end of seeing, calls time on the eye,

that marks the border between the over-

and the unexamined life.