Russell Erwin: Two Poems

Of a Marriage
(for George and Elaine)

Of eighty-nine years there are now hours.

What‘s left is the shuffle of a queue—

like a passenger committed to a flight

whose details his disease had arranged,

whose instructions his body follows,

obediently, like all first-time travelers,

to the letter.

He shifts, wakens, morphine-bleary,

tries his old bluster, then immediately drops

away, as if suddenly called to answer

a knock at the front door

at the far end of the house,

as people come and sit and having set

there, touch him or look, then leave.

He becomes agitated

—his legs scissor under the sheet,

as if elsewhere he is caught in a rip.

The effort exhausts, he sinks.

The body methodically continues its dying

while he, in their marital bed,

is stranded, is far from home.

Words disintegrate like leis

bobbing, separating and singular,

on a wide ocean.

His wife of sixty-two years

puts her lips to the waxed flesh of his face,

“Don’t worry, dear. It’s me.

It’s only me.”

The Kitchen Maid (Vermeer)

(for Margaret)

The house murmurs, stirs—the mistress

in the front parlour, who has instructed her to this,

the butcher’s boy at the back gate about to knock,

even sparrows flitting onto flagstones from the elm,

the toss and curtsy of leaves in a courtyard breeze.

There are these lives—the light is scented with them,

in the same way it is pale and yellow with the scent

of a lemon tree beyond the scullery window.

It breathes the bread with yeast-fullness

and fills the crust, the house with calm and order.

But what you see is a girl in a linen cap pouring milk.

Solid, conscientious, taking care not to spill,

for here even the light does not do that.

Steadily milk froths in the jug,

white and blue as it fills.

Yet she is unaware how she is touched:

along her left forearm as if dusted in flour,

the broad sweep across her forehead,

how her collar whitens, being laundered;

how intimately it favours the back of her right hand.

This light, like any casual gesture of love, surprises

with its flooding gift and delights her skin.

Her blood responds. On her cheek a blush

like the down of an apricot ripening.

As freely as is given to her it is given to us:

we breathe the same still air,

hear the milk gurgle as it pours,

damp rises from the corners, the cold

pooling at our feet.

Our faces too, are lit by what completes her—

this light on a painted surface,

sure from the painter’s hand, sober and clear,

is immanent with grace, rare with grace.

Although in the quiet, somewhere, we hear,

unhurried, the working of a clock.

Each second comes, lives a life,

and in the chill, is lost.

Russell Erwin