INTERIOR OF THE OUDE KERK, DELFT, WITH OPEN GRAVE

INTERIOR OF THE OUDE KERK, DELFT, WITH OPEN GRAVE

INTERIOR OF THE OUDE KERK, DELFT, WITH OPEN GRAVE

And you, friend, in a footnote, thanked
                               for kindly
                     inspecting the date “under magnification,” who

are dead these twenty years. The author will have
                               had some subtle
                     point to make (diagonal recession of the

transept, fluent brushwork, more or less
                               pronounced
                     than versions by the same hand in another

year), the painting will have been remote
                               (a small museum
                     in a small midwestern town), and you,

well you were graced with patience, you
                               might well
                     have taken pleasure in so formal, so

fastidious a task. And meanwhile this
                               alembic
                     light: the pillars in their radiant

stillness, honeyed vaulting, shadow
                               plying blessed
                     partiality, as if to say, the whole

view, yes, but not till you can bear it. Thus
                              perspective,
                     two-point, washed in milk. I do not

speak against that other beauty—lapis,
                               vermeil, leaded
                     glory with its saturating stain

of praise—but this, for me, for limpid
                               intimation of
                     the light to come, comes nearer, comes

as near as stone and pigment can be made
                               to come.
                     This church in Delft is something like

a village square: gossip, dogs, the woman frankly
                               nursing, no one
                     thinking she hasn’t a right to be here,

the sexton at his homely labor, spade
                               and shovel,
                     pickax, broom. You wouldn’t know,

to stand amidst this sociable
                               vernacular,
                     how bitter the quarrel had been. And

see: the banished image makes a small
                               return. Red chalk.
                     The children having found the too-

white pillar in the foreground too
                               approachable,
                     they’ve remedied a too-consistent

doctrine with their brightest anthropomorphic
                               scrawls. How
                     . . . what? How wry? How happy

of the painter to include so irrefutable an
                               instance of
                     the will-to-speak-in-pictures, red

graffiti on the newly chastened canvas
                               of the church.
                     And newly chastening: a four-by-eight

foot flagstone has been lifted up on plinths
                               so the sexton
                     may open the earth with his spade. Had he

thought to chase the children away,
                               he might
                     have been spared some later work with soap

and brush. He doesn’t think the dead
                               will be much
                     bothered in the meantime, though; his

country’s built on water, he should know.