Before the Museums Closed

                       L’Amarre, Effet de neige pres de Saint-Cloud, Alfred Sisley, 1879



I don’t care that the winter was particularly harsh 
and the artist had to work quickly, the paint freezing

in his veins. His mooring lines slope long and black 
across the iced canvas, like the kelp ropes we saw

on that beach near Tillamook, their bulbous roots 
like giant mermaid hair or sea snakes.

A docent interrupts to tell me pen is no longer allowed
in the museum, nor mechanized pencils; only no. 2s are permitted,

the same sticks we are just old enough to have used,
keeping us closer to the painter than to our own younger siblings.

I love a winter sky, that opal I told you was like living 
in a seashell, and you said, Too poetic.

We could both stand to get out more, the bluing 
of river ice aside; morning walks are invigorating,

I’ve been told, like the red spread of a furled sail, 
or church spires in the distance.

Preferable to me is a snow-sealed farmhouse or, 
barring that, a painting of one, the shadow

of sunrise just steaming off the treetops.
In the snowmelt, bits of bronzed clay seem molten.

So much of my life remains childish.
Why shouldn’t I lounge here, half-awake, waiting for spring?

Wait for the sun to turn brick-rose and the water 
Monet-green? I adore this translucence

and the blood that rises to the face
while chuffing up marble stairs, and I like even more a parquet floor

with mountains in the distance, almost as good
as the ghost of Mount Hood we saw from your car window.

If I could unfurl the little red sail among ice floes 
and snow fires, I would. I would welcome

a hatchet life of needles and chopped wood, forsaking 
even these canvases, fine as they are: borrowed winter.

Read more from Issue 19.1.