On a painting by Kay Sage  

Gray, but right. The shadows 
move, misty, through  

each structure & out of what can be  
rendered by limits.  

Perhaps what we need to know of this  
is that for too long, the world  

I’ve been lost to,  
is the world of this making.  

Like most, I’ve built from abandon,  
from what’s been lost— 

an architecture that helps to keep me  
holding. Haven’t we all been lonely?  

I’m here, in a museum. Outside  
the busy street howls its normal 

cry, with its normal cold,  
& perhaps it will stay that way.  

I’m here just thinking  
of how to put a painting into poem,  

make it a world. How I can  
put you into poem only to have  

to bury you again. Better: 
I can put you into poem & suspend you  

alive a little while longer. Despite  
what we know to be draped  

& coiled inside. Call it: avoiding
he plummet, the desolate, 

the way I am moved through artifice to you— 
now. Perhaps that’s extraordinary.  

Perhaps tomorrow is never 
is a comfort we wish to hear. Certainly 

tomorrow will come, & we start over. 
A lifetime. Building & rebuilding a place.  

Memories I’d like to buy back— 
last dollar, cushion change—to write them here,  

like this, because I have become so greedy. 
Here: the GM factory, bulldozed,  

is still fenced off. The river still flows past  
the wading legs of an occasional heron.  

Here: a photo is all I have of your face— 
flushed, caved in, yet full. See that look on your face? 

Who has never seen all that light? In the matte 
of the photo you maneuvered into.  

How to finish this poem when it means your face 
will only further rend from me.  

Next to me in the museum: a child & a mother. 
The mother towers as I tower,  

the child ladder-leans against her.  
What they make of this painting I have no clue.  

I imagine the three of us wallow 
in its sepia. Repeat in its caution. 

In our shared glance  
we calibrate a gray torn by walls.