"If We Never Meet Again"

                                after Keely Smith

In van Gogh's View of the Sea
at Scheveningen, a boat

sets off into a rolling sea, paint
thick with sand blown onto

the canvas from the beach
where van Gogh worked—not the same

as the sand we mixed into the paint
for the front porch steps to keep

from slipping in winter. Cicero tells how
Themistocles refused to learn

the art of memory, saying he preferred the science
of forgetting, but would Themistocles

believe the sand's no longer there, now that
the painting's been stolen? By winter

the rake had erased our entire
yard, grazing its Ouija board

of leaves, but did it ever spell
a ray cleaves to the highest point

of the shore, or just rake
leaves? Sure, there were embers

called December and remember, but did they
burn or sing—singe, rise,

combust like the ashes
of van Gogh's sea? Ater we left

The Hague, where did we stay
in Scheveningen? It was evening:

we went out to see the water, came
back in again—were we ever in

Scheveningen? It wasn't spring
but come what May, so if you can't

recall, decide whether you'd rather
remember spending hours

next to the sea, against
the sea, or in ecstasy.

Accidental

Orient yourself, occasionally
fall down to the setting
sun, red dent in
the sky like a signature
in the key of
what? Scriabin thought
the musical note C was red;
Rimsky-Korsakov said A
is pink. Not planned
or foreseen, without warning
there's a sharp or flat, altered
note not belonging. Upside
down the goldfinches hang
like commas, like rest.
On occasion, remember
that in Venice there is
no dust, non troppo,
not too much, but if you must fall,
fall west: each evening, gather
in baskets the day lilies'
blooms, watch how they close
by the bushel.

Chez Nous

                    we say vive
la difference between morals
and morels: the accent,
spelling, shape of the mouth
whenever it eats or
speaks. According to Sargent,
a portrait is a painting
with something wrong with
the mouth, but chez nous
the paintings have
no mouths and do not need
to sing because what we call
darkness darkens
in octaves.
                    And indeed,
if we consider this beautiful
machine of the world,
Palladio wrote, so much needs
oiling: the porch swing
of the chickadee's song, the mourning
dove flung up like the window's
wooden sash, the word
rudbeckia.
                   And isn't news
rude, the way
it beckons? Le corps
becomes a copse, someone's
opus, but we can't imagine
whose because chez nous
the peonies dress for dinner
like grizzlies
                  in their pungent
fuchsia coats while the dead
settle back and go on
discussing how to leave
a world that begins
each April to finish
its sentence with another
inch of green.
                     Let Marcus Aurelius go on
believing he has the last
say—you'd need to be stoic
to believe the universe
will be destroyed in a great
conflagration and then be re-formed
exactly as it was before. Chez nous
the world will end
like the end of Haydn's Farewell
Symphony, when all the players,
one by one, get up
from their seats and walk
offstage.

Angie Estes' most recent book is Chez Nous (Oberlin College Press, 2005). Her second book, Voice-Over (2002), won the FIELD Poetry Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (1995), received the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. Recent poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Slate, Ninth Letter, and in The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women. She has received fellowships from the NEH, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, California Arts Council, and Ohio Arts Council, and is the winner of a 2005 Pushcart Prize. She teaches at The Ohio State University, Columbus.

Click here to read a review on Chez Nous.  Click here to read more about Angie Estes' work.

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