Natura Morta, Felice Casorati, 1943

This grief is just one setting 
for another.
Sit and observe
the tints:
red for fires,
grey for floods,
black for cracks
in the crust.
Isn’t it attractive to imagine
the rust-colored leaves 
circling the wind-raked
trees before falling,
the stalling of the line
before it reaches back,
the artist selecting
four ripe apples
for each season?
See how we
take and take
whatever’s in vision?

ξ

Crouching Spider

What pleased me more
than the drive or the sunlight
glittering like a nude
in a museum

was the giant spider
in the attic room, the brick walls barely
enclosing legs as long as my body,
the torso large enough

to crush but held,
hovering, by the ends of bronze
pins, tipped. People prefer Maman.
The woman

who is childless
like the woman who is alone:
shunned. This one
is just a spider

so it will do
as it pleases. And I, too,
could have put on
a dress,

but I chose
the cloak of the invisible web,
unfit for the room, cold
to the touch.

ξ

Shell Paint Container, Maya, 550–850 AD

The conch shell palette
is shaped to mimic a hand:
five tiny fingers, the palm
curiously smooth, lengthened

to sit on a wrist.
What color was its paint?
I can make out
no ancient trace,

no sign to whom
once held this
shadow bowl. 

Well, I know
the hand without
lines is the hand
without fortune —

cradled as we once
were cradled,
plucked from the ocean,
then split open.

ξ

I saw Munch’s Winter Landscape, 1915, and it made me think of you

The road seemed to roll
into ocean when we
pulled up Munjoy Hill
in snow. I felt so surely
about it then, all those
rock edges purpling
like doors or portals, perhaps,
to blue-mounded sea.
I could offer myself to a surprise
that quiet, could love quiet
enough to ask, Is that sky?
Suddenly, I saw inlet,
back life, your eyes
greening in the light.

ξ

Madeline Gilmore has a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Boston University. Her poetry has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Epiphany, The New Guard, Vinyl, and other publications. She is the co-editor of Volume Poetry. Originally from North Carolina, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.