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Contrast, Composition

I don't know what color to name Ray's tree.
Perhaps it's one of the broken and neutral nameless
colors Van Gogh believed were the foundation of everything.
Perhaps not. All morning I've been reading

Van Gogh's letters, returning to his discussions
of color and descriptions of scenes he will paint.
Along the quays at Antwerp, he takes a fruitful walk,
where all he sees—a muddy white horse

beside a warehouse, Flemish sailors laughing
in their beers, a Chinese girl with a small, oval face—
offers itself as contrast and composition
beneath a grey sky. One could undertake everything here,

he tells Theo. This is not so many years
before the good god sun, the devil of a mistral,
the radiant days and electric nights at Arles, where
he discovers the sunflower, somewhat my own,

and where he will paint his first, brilliant
version of The Starry Night. Not so many years
before his neighbors will petition to have him
confined. I am well just now, he writes

from the asylum, except for a certain undercurrent
of vague sadness. Here, the late-twentieth
century light clarifies a composition perfectly
American: beyond Ray's and mine, similar

houses. One bears a wind-rippled flag.
another a canary-yellow ribbon snaked around its
mailbox post in support of our most recent
war. I don't know if Van Gogh would have painted

this or how much one can undertake
among these wood and glass and brick façades
that give nothing away, these neighbors out
or lost behind drawn curtains. Perhaps

he'd have done this sky the faint blue
of fresh milk, these laddering sparrows drawing
the eye to Our Lady of Mercy's steeple rising
white, narrow as a spike, toward an idea of Paradise.

Nights Mutable as Water Revise Themselves into the Shape of Our Extravagant Past

so that even the mildest gesture
astonishes, just as this night's fickle
snowfall startles the ripening orchard,

throngs of Cortland dwarfs, rimed
in silver, curving their slim branches
to dark earth. Trailing our rockiest

good intentions, that slipshod
cortège of poor elections and risky
marriages, we hurtled, breakneck,

toward a future dubious as any history
text. And maybe we were liars,
crooning blue lullabies as we battled

for purchase, ambitious for anything
costly, even these small, moony apples—
charming but wrong.

What It Is

Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most
densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes
startled him to find they still imagined he was there.

        —Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

All morning the wind suggests
departure, troubling
the glass, ferrying the dead

leaves, lavish in their traveling
colors, from branch to gutter
as it makes for distant latitudes.

And it's erotic, isn't it—
the way it shifts, fickle, hushed
as an insinuating gesture,

among the lightening trees?
Maybe it's this novel I've been reading,
Wharton's Archer so absent

he's like a newborn, astonished
by anything—light sparking
off cut crystal, the cool timbre

of a woman's low voice.
And I must admit it scares me
to know so well those shadow

rooms he's cluttered with imaginary
furniture, what it is to bring
to them his cherished books

and company, to wait with him,
beneath a Paris sky the bluest
glacier could get lost in, losing

my place to this insistent wind,
until dusk, evening's resplendent pardon.

Half-Light: No Feeling

And then winter, chill light
fading with the afternoon, the various greys
deepening to violet and charcoal
beyond the steam-clouded pane.
Her tea cooling in a chipped, enamelled mug,

a young woman sits listening
to the voice of a man she once loved
swearing grief's whitened his hair
in the year since she left him, that he longs
for their child. The first streetlights

hum on and all along the block,
the tranquil glow of shuttered houses
in their yellow hoops of porchlight,
as if nothing within could ever be too wrong.
Now the man weeps, he wants her

to come someplace he calls home, but she
wants only to forget him, which is why
she has travelled so far, leaving miles
of prairie and complicated highways,
the endless small towns, and filthy, dazzling

cities, those hundreds of thousands
of strangers, between them. I was that woman,
and nights like this, blues on the radio
and ice stippling every window, I try
to understand what love is, how it disappears

and leaves us strange to those once
ached for. Only images return: a flowered
cup on a sill, the early December dark.
A once-cherished voice, grown distant
as the moon. No feeling I can begin to name.

SUSAN AIZENBERG's new book of poems, Muse, won the 2001 CRAB ORCHARD AWARD IN POETRY (Southern Illinois University Press 2002).  She is the coeditor (with Erin Belieu) of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, a contributing editor to the Nebraska Review, and author of a chapbook-length collection of poems, Peru, which appears in Take Three: 2: AGNI New Poets Series.  Her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in the Journal, AGNI, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, the Philadelphia Inquirer, ForPoetry.com, and many other publications.  She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

The above four poems are taken from Aizenberg's new book, Muse.

"Contrast, Composition" first appeared in Baybury Review.  "Nights Mutable as Water Revise Themselves int the Shape of Our Extravagant Past" first appeared in AGNI. "What It Is" first appeared in Poetry Miscellany.  "Half-Light: No Feeling" first appeared in The Connecticut Review.

Click here to read more poems by Susan Aizenberg in ForPoetry.com.

ForPoetry