A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, and: Backward Postcard Mailed from Amherst

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

We weren't wrestling over global
war & certainly weren't making
predictions about the world's end
so that when you asked how I
imagined death would be, I was
startled & could only think of that
painting, the thirty or so minutes
I spent lost in it at the Art Institute
& all the while others to-ing & fro-ing,
brushing up against me, whispering to
themselves as if I didn't even exist,
& the Seine before us, the boats, all
motionless as if those boats planned
it just that way from all eternity,
absolutely no dipping & dragging
with the current. No current. On
the bank the expressionless were
taking their Sunday afternoon stroll
beneath the shade of trees & hats
& pleasant umbrellas as each stared
head-on into the mystery that stretched
out there beyond them. In my mind I am
waving & waving from the Beyond, beyond
the roped-off area separating them & us,
but they all seem to be staring, lost in
themselves, staring straight ahead
as if what was there wasn't there.
That, I imagine, is death when
I'm brave enough & allow
myself to imagine death.

Backward Postcard Mailed from Amherst

Scowling is on the face of an impatiently owlish imp whose
mother hides the bird of hope beneath her tourist's eyes:

hemlocks, heavenly in their limbs, link arms before
the buzz & bustle of the second floor. Sweetest desire,

once lowered in a wicker basket, returns today as you do, alive
in hundreds of fractured, foreign tongues. A 2:15 tour: we've

split into two camps, on fire, fearing what's abnormal.
Why white, folded-paper cranes, pebbles & feeble,

scribbled prayers left on your headstone & the
iron grate-work; why? My Dearest E.,

7.6.97