It was perhaps Hollandish. A tinted print
of a functional waterway tearing a town apart.
Aproned ladies and laddies in breeches.
A dog baited by a strip of bacon. Louise didn’t care
for such scenes. Static antics, she said. Sterile takes
on quotidian twilight.
Give me rapture and bliss, she told Ham.
Hieronymus Bosch and Mister S. Dalí
(her sister Lydia claimed to have seen the latter
her second summer in Montmartre).
The epiphany of Yves Tanguy walking a panther
seaside in Cannes.
Such sights call up the shades, Louise said.
Only they know how to last.
Meaning, forever.
All else shifts the way the print has now tilted
with no one near.
Ham crossed the carpet to right it.
. . .
Of course, Louise too could be a pretty picture: a woman
riveted to earth in raiments
right for the season—hilarity on her face,
the boat balanced behind her. From another angle
a perilous island
of plenty volcanic—tigers hidden in treetops,
leopards masking the faces
of mountains—an irresistible silence on the edge
of a ruin, warm at the wrist.