Winter In Cloud
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Canaletto, “Old Walton Bridge over the Thames”
Bean-shaped clouds steal winter’s laziness, the sketch of trees, bare rocks, pale ground below mare’s tails, feathers, the cotton lumps insolvent
and brutish on the swirl of January. I studied their climbing orders— only in underpaint could they be stilled.
No wonder I loved the painter’s frozen studies, hovering air on which the smudged and harnessed sky took shape like a dream of smoke, or soot
spooled into drains. In Canaletto’s travels far from Venice, he found the light of God, the English fire
in cannonading peace dropped onto a matchstick bridge sawn from ivory. Beneath that blank sky standing in afterglow,
that heaven would be savior of us all. [End Page 171]
William Logan’s most recent book of poems, Madame X, was published by Penguin in 2012. He received the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry last spring. His next book of criticism, Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure, will be published by Columbia University Press in Spring 2014.
