Poems
Day by Day (1977)
Epilogue
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer1 gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(Day by Day, 1977)
1Johannes Vermeer or Jan Vermeer (October 31, 1632 - buried on December 15, 1675) was a Dutch painter, who lived and worked in Delft. He is also sometimes referred to as Vermeer of Delft or Johannes van der Meer. Alongside Rembrandt, Vermeer is the best known painter of the Dutch Golden Age, and his paintings are admired for their transparent colours, careful composition, and brilliant use of light. Although his choice of subject matter, colors, and composition was similar to that of certain contemporaries (especially Pieter de Hooch,Vermeer acheived a timeless, monumental quality in his paintings that places it on a level all its own. His total production was extremely small by the standards of the time, perhaps 50 paintings in all, of which approximately 35 have survived. His current reputation is a recent phenomenon; all but forgotten, he was "rediscovered" by the French writer, critic, and activist Thore-Burger in the mid-19th Century, and his stature has been on the ascent ever since.
