Pentimento

After Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window”

The effect—for those three hundred years, while the cupid remained hidden—was a kind of silence.

Like the man who brought a bouquet of roses into the nail salon and approached a quiet, teary-eyed woman in a pedicure chair. How she looked away until he left, still holding them.

If it is a question of degrees of permanence, I want an experience that is more permanent.

From eros, this language takes one of two paths: erosive, erosion.

I used to pay for glimpses into my future. Every star map, palm line, and tarot deck pointed in the same direction, signaling “a great romance.”

Here is a problem with love that is also a problem with poems: how often they wish to speak plainly, yet don’t.

Those points came and went.

My friend and I discuss which line should come last. He says, a silence is also something you can read.

Source: Poetry (November 2024)