Landscape with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting

Cream and magenta on asphalt, the blooms that ripened
early on the dogwood now loosened by sudden rain—

Do you know why the couple touch hands in the Van Eyck
painting? Their decorum holds the house pillars up,

plumps the cushions, velvets the drapes for commerce,
theirs and the world’s. See how the mirror repeats

and reflects them back to each other, though crowned
by a rondel of suffering. In her green robe with its

multitude of gathers, she casts a faint shadow on the bed.
And the fruit on the window sill might be peach,

might be pear, might be apple– something with glimmering
skin, like the lover and the scar he wore like a badge

to the side of his throat. Fickle nature, cold and grainy
as the day that spills its seed above the fields, indiscriminate,

so things grow despite themselves. And there was the one
who said never, but turned from you to rinse his hands.

Who else loves his own decorum as I do? The names
of trees are lovely in latinate. I can’t recite those,

can only name their changing colors: flush
and canary, stripped and rose; or moan like the voice

of a cello in the leaves, imitating human speech.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 21 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.