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A painting bought cheap at the thrift store,
The cloth matting soiled with oil and grime,
Stains of another place, from another time,
By others who beheld and loved it before.
A Montreal winterscape when life was hard,
Painted in ‘38 by an artist long-ignored,
The gathering sorrow of Europe is fore-
Shadowed, our city rendered in graveyard
Tones; rust, muted blues, greens and greys,
Rooftops swathed in thick chimney smoke,
Ramshackle wooden balconies bent and broke,
Tenements of sacrifice and malaise.
Today our preoccupation is decor,
Choosing from an assortment of frames,
Columns of hung parentheses, many the same,
Initial thoughts of matching walls and floor.
Then a word surfaces about what the artist meant,
His travails, a certain responsibility moves us
To deeper levels, we begin to discuss
Other dimensions—take of ourselves a measurement.
The framer waits impatiently as we mull our choice.
I lean in, share with my wife our sweet secret,
She smiles, the framer fails to interpret.
She tells him to make us an invoice.
1 comment:
Love the a-b-b-a rhyme scheme. And this poem indeed has some very clever and inventive rhymes. You have chosen a worthy poetic subject: the framing/reframing of an old picture. The poem works on many levels ... the respect for and appreciation of art, the contrast of previous darker times with our own (perhaps equally dark?) times, the sympathy and communication between husband and wife and the secret language they use to make decisions, and, finally, the cluelessness of the shopkeeper. I love the line ... "take of ourselves a measurement" ... it's a powerhouse of a line, and a brilliant tincture of the poem as a whole.
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