PHOTOGRAPH
It’s almost Giacomettish of you,
your rather persistent disinclination
toward the up-close photo
of us that I often ask for as we travel.
As though it held less truth
than untruth as we lean against a sycamore,
or sit across a white linen table
where the great invisible
distance that is alive and well between
any two people, no matter how much love,
has once again slipped past undetected
by the dull instrument of the camera.
That great invisible distance
that Giacometti wanted to show
when he positioned his models standing
a few feet from him as he worked
but strove to make viewers perceive them
as from a point farther away.
And that these dual perspectives
hold each other in perfect balance
like two children on a seesaw,
neither pair of feet
touching the dusty ground. It’s almost
Giacomettish of you,
when I ask a friendly tourist
to snap a picture of us,
a once in a lifetime shot to remember
the two of us overlooking
the giant maw of Vesuvius
that erupted those
many millennia ago,
and you once again, refuse.
*
On The Swimmer by Pablo Picasso
Orange figure in blue water,
arms flung out like wings,
female, in freefall, letting the water
hold you any way it wants.
The paint brushed thinly
as if it too were floating. And after
swimming, when you lie
on sun-warmed shale,
I imagine each drying water bead
as the remains of that second skin
that had held you, everywhere,
as only the water can,
loved even your miserable parts.
Stuck its wet tongue all over
into the very smallest spaces,
those most difficult
to open that you had allowed
yourself to forget.
*
THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
after a painting by Rose Wylie
Before they razed the hedge, I did not see it.
What I saw—just the warm brown
of wood-slatted fence and reaching green
from the other side. I’m a painter. I was held
by those colors, did not even imagine
a domicile with other humans.
Each morning, the wrens, round as notes
in the dry brush from last autumn.
The house is yellow. It does not cheer me
with its single black window
like an eye gone dark.
But oh, how I love the brown
tall tree that leans towards the house next door.
And that I can paint away from the truth:
that this tree is rooted firmly
on my side of the fence and could not
crush that house were it to fall.
*
Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at the 92nd Street Y and is Associate Editor-at Large for Plume Poetry journal. Her poems have appeared the New York Times, Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, Plume, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, RATTLE, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, Echolocation, was published by Plume Editions/MadHat Press in March of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award, a longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Award and Runner Up for the Poetry By the Sea Best Book Award.
