Our Faces, Superimposed On Still Life, and: Memorial

for Lois

The man in the painting glows in a darkness
the curator calls the artist's attempt
to contain contradictions of the flesh.

You point to his dominant hand,
frozen into perpetual strangling
of a creature that lost its future

to a puddle of rose madder paint.
Is it a hummingbird? A fetus?
It is difficult to tell.

I'm watching his other hand caress
a hundred broken swirls of color,
the blue and gold and burnt sienna

of what could be a lamb in a field
of wheat - or is it a piece of glass
from the stained-glass window behind him

that picks up every tone in the room
and makes me want to sing a hymn?
It is so difficult to tell.

You've just come from the holocaust
museum's mountain of empty shoes.
Forget about forgiveness - so many were your size!

I've walked here from my father's house
where I went to revisit the Dutch light
of his face, a brown-green-blackish tint

with a warm undercoating of yellow
that only now, late in his life, appears
to be making its way to the top.

How can you love him? you ask
and I don't know if you're talking about
the man in the painting or my father

but I'm thinking of all the relative
strangers trapped under painted skins
and wondering how long it took the artist

to featherstroke phthalo blue and ochre
into the creases of this man's hand,
how long to let him

pet the lamb or run his fingers
through the stalks of wheat.
Now you're watching a windowless train

outside the frame of the painting
and my own head has disappeared
into an old family photo.

Later, over coffee, I'll ask you how long
you think the artist took to unearth that face
with its regret, its real anguish

and not for the first time we'll wonder
how two atheists can talk so freely
about mortal sin and redemption.

Memorial

for Chris Howell

I wanted to say something
meaningful, something wise, about
what we'd gathered for.

Instead I sat quietly, watching the cat,
who was blissfully unshaken
by knowing what we knew-

the where and how and when.
She padded right into the cave
beneath the coffin's silver scaffold

and brushed her cheeks against the cold
and sniffed. Then she turned
and swam toward the mourners,

her plush purse of a body opening
to the many outstretched hands.
I know I was not alone

in wanting the cat to belong there - named
by a daughter, fed by her, cradled
by her during the years before she left

for college, and then for the coast
of Brazil, with its ocean hungry for human
flesh. It was just a neighborhood tabby

who wandered through the open door
by some instinct, and rubbed against our legs
and accepted the mute weight of our hands

on its back, and showed us
how to get through it - how to be touched
so gravely, and still move on.