Читать книгу Grace, Fallen from - Marianne Boruch - Страница 11

Someone arranged them in 1620.

Someone found the rare lemon and paid

a lot and neighbored it next

to the plain pear, the plain

apple of the lost garden, the glass

of wine, set down mid-sip—

don’t drink it, someone said, it’s for

the painting. And the rabbit skull—

whose idea was that? There had been

a pistol but someone was told, no,

put that away, into the box with a key

though the key had been

misplaced now for a year. The artist

wanted light too, for the shadows.

So the table had to be moved. Somewhere

I dreamt the diary entry

on this, reading the impossible

Dutch quite well, thank you, and I can

translate it here, someone writing

it is spring, after all, and Herr Müller

wants a window of it in the painting, almost

a line of poetry, I thought even then,

in the dream, impressed

with that “spring after all,” that

“window of it” especially, how sweet

and to the point it came over

into English with no effort at all

as I slept through the night. It was heavy,

that table. Two workers were called

from the east meadow to lift

and grunt and carry it

across the room, just those

few yards. Of course one of them

exaggerated the pain in his shoulder.

Not the older, the younger man.

No good reason

to cry out like that. But this

was art. And he did, something

sharp and in the air that

one time. All of them turning then,

however slightly. And there he was,

eyes closed, not much

more than a boy, before

the talk of beauty

started up again.