“Watercolors ” and “House Tour” are poems by Portland’s new poet laureate, Linda Aldrich.
Watercolors
You use blue sparingly because cerulean goes
fast with so much sky and then sky in ocean
in this muffled, soft-edged world –
grand sweep of water into water, your brush
spreading sand to a blur of faint color that dries
to almost nothing. I look to see if I can find us
walking a pale pulp of beach, expressive
arms, the way we need to talk above
the surge of rain stick sound sucked back
through stones, a graveled song of comfort.
If not on the beach, evanescent is the word
I wish for – luminous disappearance, how waves
hold turquoise deep within and give it up when
the sun goes down, but not forever, not for good,
though now you’ve left the sea to paint mountains –
you place yourself inside the farthest,
darkest green, where a clouded slope joins
the felted valley of the one behind it,
and I know you are fishing. Each day I hear you
drop a quiet line into my fear of losing you.
The French aquarelle lets vowels float away
on little loops of L, an unassuming softness for an art
that suffers no mistakes. What’s done is done, it says,
make sure you get it right the first time. Victorians
believed women handled loss better than men
because they could always tidy up the cupboard
or dust the teacups, but I’d sooner paint myself
in sepia of twilight, supple and permeable.
Wet on wet, I’d meld my way to where you last
were seen and find you by the river. Be your fish.
House Tour
No nearer, lest reality
Should disenthrall thy soul.
E. Dickinson
Six thousand dollars, he says,
for two replica dresses made in England.
The dress you will see, the stay-at-home-
out-of-sight dress, not the dress
gone to Harvard, never to graduate
beyond private viewings. However,
for the price of a ticket, our feet
can go up the stairs to her room.
Hands to yourselves, please: this wool
shawl, her shawl, this sleigh bed, indeed.
her bed. Some sign of her then, perhaps
a bend of hip in mattress, a pen
scratch on the desk? Not really
her desk. Perhaps it will come back
someday. For now, this way.
Shined and perfect, rubbed clean
of her presence, hardwood sanded
below footprints, cabinet doors stuck
from too many layers, and the dress
she never wore, fresh as a corsage
in its plexiglass box, tiny pleats folded
white over white, buttons to the floor,
made to her measure. She was so small,
smaller than we thought, yet always
too much for us, dismayed to find
her gone before we had a chance.
Only the windows give us something:
square on square of pale winter sun,
old glass melting in and out of focus,
her grief contained to right angles
on the nursery of her nephew’s death,
the lawn too wide to cross.
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