White paint splattered across a canvas
of high grass, clusters of daisies
glow at dusk, their infinite bright faces
like galaxies of fat stars
punctuated by buttercups—
pools of semicolons and ellipses.
The field’s flowers become light spilled
and scattered amongst impenetrable layers
and shades of green—bushes and trees climbing
the hill behind a yellow house, gathering
strength in late May beneath a Technicolor
Magritte evening sky. Under the front porch light,
on the stoop’s stage, a moth drags heavy,
cream-colored wings of tissue
striped with the palest pink
along a notebook’s edge, oblivious
to the poem being written around it.
In spite of it. Suddenly about it. Claws
along the horizontal ladder of metal
spiral and all three edges of thin paper
then follows the faint blue tracks
of black script. Climbs onto the pen
that is writing it. Traces
the pen’s length then paces. Declines
to the poem again, circles a stanza
before abandoning the poem
altogether and settling on the copper
beer mug, orange body folding
beneath draping wings like a miniature aircraft
parked without fanfare.
The world does not ask us to write it
or paint it. We persist, century
after century, asking pigment
and syllable to bring us closer
to the world’s body, like a lover
longing to describe the beloved.
We work the oil to remember
how the field sways, seducing
us to enter. We unwind the line
to catch the moth that is already gone.
