It is intended that you read both poems, for their similarities, and dissimilarities.
Nunc dimittis
It is morning and I am kneeling
in the garden
- Patrick Lane
As if forsythia were a yellow pathway
through wandering air
to the face of the girl in Vermeer’s painting
asking why her fine
skin cheek is afraid.
As if the last river gorge of Atlantis
were a silver ring
of silent blue water.
As if Picasso’s
African women of Avignon
could turn to
horses
and their snorts leave
the Austrian Wittgenstein,
the German Heidegger,
the
Husserl
in their endless coming to now?
Am I genuflecting in the garden?
I don’t know,
but three griefs I cannot understand:
the small Teresa,
fingers spread to and
away from awakening; a mythical god’s
insistence on joy;
the splinter of rose emerging
from my face.
Ours is a cold country,
and
espaliered fruit in southern sun makes it
no less cold, on the most august day.
Can the windmill undo its spiraling?
I would like to know.
As if green tomatoes
come after cold, before the girl’s cheek,
one who walks green water,
arbutus skin
that peels like
pages
of a white book.
Would you, if you could
tell
the girl how it will be,
that her painter is the residence of her questions,
the dry river gorges
of Osoyoos, of Keremeos?
I return to the garden and my feet touch not the ground.
Green tomatoes rise into my hands, the girl’s windmill,
hydra blue against blue of windsock,
full cheeked on neck of land.
Can a pearl be afraid?
Her windmill
turns
to me
and asks whether it may now take its leave.
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