The boundaries were there, the orchard,
where in spring we would climb
down from our windows, shake clean
our hair, and offer ourselves to the sky,
framed by the branches, a lesson in perspective-
the apple trees’ congested blossoms
against the Constable clouds,
English and majestic,
like the poems we were happy to abandon.
“Views of Mt. Fuji” our devotion might have seemed,
persistent as Hokusai’s fine gradations of seeing,
intent on exactitude, replication,
students of nature uncovering
the mineral world,
the invisible fire beneath the ice.
The days were diligently divided
into books of hours, each hour
a season, a state of mind illuminated differently.
We studied the decline of beauty,
admired Mondrian’s strict view of the world-
how the black lines stabilized the colors,
the gridiron of discipline
like a dancer’s training barre
did not imprison:
the colors leaped, became more efficient.
Patience and Restraint were the names of our daughters.
We yearned to be virtuous,
to embody an ideal.
Thin as Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday,
you belonged to Ingres,
to the architectural lines
of his furniture, crisp, classical,
more so than the serpentine women
who lounged upon them,
their necks and arms as thick as pythons.
White hands, white face,
anorexic, a black rose in the snow,
you made a minimalist statement toward a metaphor.
Like the chilled orchid, seeded in science,
a distillation unfolding, you resembled
a fabulous, futuristic bird.
So practice would make us perfect
in the repetition of school figures,
obedience traced into the crystalline structure,
unadorned and essential as numbers-
the reclining nude,
the 20th-century novel,
the irreducible core of Cézanne’s monumental apples.
In the afternoons Breughel
became our patron saint.
This the hour of the magnifying glass,
the small detail and the postage stamp,
multiplied until there were a dozen
of us at the lake’s edge, lacing our skates.
The lake that in November saw
the wind’s agitated brush strokes
rip its surface by February felt
the stark calligraphy of skaters
gliding by in figure eights,
a loose confederacy of ducklings and swans
linked by an unselfconscious grace.
We felt the pull of the ice
as we moved in silence across the lake.
So quiet when the first snow fell,
when you were walking back at twilight,
a pair of skates slung over your shoulder
the way Breughel’s hunters might have carried
home a dead rabbit, trapped in the black forest,
the odor of fur sharp and warm.
There was beauty in your flight.
You walked in quick strides
as if you knew something about yourself was fleeting
and inconsequential in the wheel of lights
beginning to spin across the sky.
The stars yielded to the pull of their own fire,
that long infinite perfection,
and, like skaters,
traced the daily recital toward oblivion
etched in ice.
The black and white of it,
you knew about it then.
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