Someone
has left a lily, tilted
in
an antique flask - someone has painted
this
annunciation before: the slide of planes
which
descry the room, the collision of light
as
if an angel lingered, beckoning –
having
burned out the walls with its eyes.
The
whole place now
stands
open to brimming skies.
Leaving,
the painter took his brushes. The lily
he’d
found and cut with such reverence
he
placed at the heart of the work -
then
left the painting to compose itself. These walls
will
never hold space the same way again,
because
they have summoned an angel
to
dispense the rain.
The
room darkens
and
the angel becomes more distinct.
A
convulsion of light is its hand
burning
the cup’s rim. All day the rain
has
brimmed up there,
writhing
and boiling, winding its dynamo.
The
cup is taken: from an angel
with
eyes through which rain pierces.
But
had the painting shown any room
(since
all rooms intersect) each would have held
an
angel with its own annunciation. And wet tiles
with
footprints leading away, and the soft drum
of
rain on leaves.
Yet
though in some rooms a lily, newly unclosed,
might
lean - in others
the
dark, inward-reaching eyes
would
endlessly hold discourse with a rose.
Now with the unrolling of the sky and the light's wane
the thunder at last
brings down its harvest of tall rain.
