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[Poetry]

NOT YET AUGUST
by Stuart Greenhouse

Rank green, the smell back there,
I haven't mown in months, the milkweed towers,

so down the sash and up the a/c, back

to arranging these pretty sunflowers
in the icily modern crystal vase           

wedding gift our friend, dead since,

picked for us
from a shelf of so many

when we were young.

  

IN TURNER'S VENICE, FROM THE PORCH OF MADONNA DELLA SALUTE
                                                            J.M.W. Turner, ca. 1835

Four of us at the table, and the first
problem before us has us speechless:
who starts? Ruskin rubs his napkin
across the moist crumbs on his moustache; halts,
wears it like a veil, his eyes intenser
for their framing, for their staring
at Marcel who, encouraged, wants to gather
the golden silent morning into word
but, polite in his knowing
that once started he cannot stop, declines; his eyes,
limpid as they are stark in his deathmask photo by Man Ray,
return the light to a light continuous as the painting
we are in, we are in Venice, morning’s Venice,
Turner’s Venice, and since I can’t
turn mine from the glittering
stairs and the forest of masts and the clouds of steam
our coffees evaporate into; from there, behind the wall
to the right of the third-back pillar, not hidden,
not visible, where studied
Turner’s sketches fan out on the table before us
visually rhythmic and similar amongst themselves
as the silence of our conversation is amongst the light which blur we
and this whole city arrange out of and into
the prints on my grandmother’s living room wall.
                                                                          These are his studies
arranged around brightness like four men around a table
amongst whom there is no ceiling but the sun, no black
but the gondolas, no blue but the grand canal.
Ruskin, please
say something moral to stone and memory;
Proust, the canal is flowing,
won’t you please.
                            On the water
crinkly and heavy as mercury,
commerce; on the water, shadow; under the water, under
the frame, my grandmother is snoring
into her plastic-covered lime-green couch, I should hear
my brother and I up late and brilliant
with laughter in the single bedroom in the twin beds
kept for us those weekends sleeping over.
If only I were not so dazzled
by the decay of day seeping
into us as it passes overhead or by this alembic limbo
of conversation I desired desiring but
imagine with no voice maybe
the years would seem study
like sketches to a painting or dreams
to a day or memory
to love and maybe, encouraged
by my self-enclosed fantasy to look out of my fantasy,
I would.





Stuart Greenhouse's chapbook, “What Remains,” was published by the Poetry Society of America and a second, “All Architecture,” was published as an e-chapbook by End & Shelf Press. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, Paris Review, and Ploughshares.


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