where barely awake and naked
I stand at the top of the stairs,
a bas-relief against a book-encased wall,
and watch you leave for the day.
You may ask: how does the nude
fit into the contemporary setting?
And Cézanne thought apples
were the most difficult fruit.
Remember the year I stopped eating apples?
Remember the summer I kept bringing home
abandoned chairs? A lucid Vincent wrote
to his brother: I have tried
to express the terrible passions
of humanity by means of red and green.
His self-portrait now hangs in the Fogg.
Remember the summer I had to walk
to the Lake just to feel anything at all?
When I descend late in the afternoon
there's a blue plate of heart-
shaped cookies, there's an orange
on the kitchen counter. I notice a crack
in the seam of the ceiling, a spider
vein on the inside of my knee.
What a still still life!
The rest of the day is a slanted floorboard.
The rest of the day is the color of absinthe.
Note the personal and detached attitude.
Note the application of arbitrary color.
The tilted perspective.
This poem is all surface.
You may stand where you choose.
This poem has no vanishing point.
