Still Life with Sergei Osipov with a line from Frank O’Hara The cornflowers in a green vase easily associated on a table inside— No more miracles until afternoon. I want a quiet life: cans of blueberry jam, dark roast, the semi-cubism of things in rain. No one around to hear me say it. Though I am not without lust, our bold century rolling on its belly like a dog in heat. And all that abstract feeling entering as blue in every corner of the painting. But I have gone out. Today it’s the green that hounds my walk, trees asserting vert in polished light wherever I go and everything appearing to me without density: a man biking past, his cello, ghostly in its white case, strapped to his back like his soul going for a piggyback ride. The hour round and turning happily cannibal. My gaze, guessing after him down Main Street, already arriving in my near- distant future. All to the good! I say to the bougainvillea bunching magenta in every yard. That so many shapes can produce dimension is still a marvel. That my life— its here and now— arises all at once in things. A radio in someone’s car playing crumpled jazz. The city bus swinging to a stop for a woman with a baby. Paint peeling to wood on one house and not another. Nothing recurrent. Today, I think I see my mother’s face waving like a flock of startled birds in the shrug of someone’s green coat as they pass by. Though she is not dead yet, she would forgive me for thinking she was. And it would be just like her to come calling semi-regularly for all the years I was alive and she wasn’t. The present asking her here like leaving the telephone on when no one is speaking. Casually, I tell her she is one of my great loves before she disappears into the woman she always was, the green coat just a green coat opening in a light breeze. What was hardly seen by the Greeks in their poems was called glaukos, vague color of everything around; water and eyes, leaves and long drips of honey. What’s green if the word can be so easily seen through? Though perhaps, it is true not to have noticed a word like fate, preferring the unaligned pleasure of spotting the sky as it turns suddenly open and without interruption. Sergei, did you think of it as a window or a mirror? I’m so glad you didn’t think to put the blue flowers in the blue vase.
Probability Theory Water and milk. Of course, I was worse off last September, Walking circuits through the city. What was mine? The listless glitter Of sirens. Police vehicles wading along streets, idle On the edge of someone else’s emergency. Pray They lived, next morning reissuing them Into its wholly earthly light. The wet gasp of a sprinkler Turning on in the neighbor’s yard. I was stepping through confession then, like Vermeer When he reused the morning of The Milkmaid For Young Woman with a Water Pitcher. The event of These two women waking in the same house, a window To the right in each. In the heavy blue of the Madonna. To see them, is to see their arms Widening only to the extent of ritual. What did he mean To concede by their sameness Though the drama of the foregrounds? Scattered Bread crusts, flutter of cloth across a table. In each, the miracle of pigment Resolving in rough tones of light across the wall. Their stillness unfinished and brokering the day. To say love is tangential. To say I was alone all winter, Is a kind of truth. What seems Inevitable in one: the blue cupid along the baseboard Walking into the larger field of the room.
Landis Grenville received an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Hanging Loose, and elsewhere. Currently, she lives and teaches in Jacksonville, Florida.