In Each Dimmed Room

after Ray Crooke’s Woman with Blossoms (1962-1963)
The bright world waits by the open door.

Linen wrinkled on the table

the waxy flowers arranged like a still life.

Life, now static as colour is. Turned in

from the sea the man considers

what it means to live

as shadow might – wedded to light.

Limes ripen in a bowl. The blossoms gathered.

No movement but the sea in the distance

that impasto that presides over everything

over the women, who are featureless

as the room goes on darkening where the man

will remain eternally, thinking nothing.

Not of shadow or light, nor the filament-lit

blue, imperfect as Gauguin’s, whose women

turn their backs on us. Each story we tell

of paradise ends with its undoing.