Driving lakeside toward the curve at the granite outcrop

I can’t see what’s coming. And twilight makes it worse,
tricks the guard rail into the shape of a leaping deer.

I almost swerve – but headlights over the lake 
swing into the opposite lane and I hold my nerve.

I’d been in the city looking at paintings 
especially one, the colour of night, a dress

indistinguishable from its background, therefore 

invisible, yet present in every fold, every twist

of thread around thread, every ripple and shimmer. 
It seemed to open a world beyond

the walls of its room, beyond where I stood looking. 
The sea-green eyes of its wearer registered – what?

What I saw kept shifting, bewilderment, distrust, belief, 
as if, aware she was being made stroke by stroke into

something no longer herself, woven into the story 
of beauty as human accomplishment, she

resisted. I could almost hear 
the maker’s eager ambition, rustling in the silk.

And now, hours later driving home, I can’t tell 
what anything is: glorious human invention

bright and alive, or the world, wrecked and burning.



The italicized lines in this poem play with lines from W. G. Sebald’s essay ‘A Little Excursion to Ajaccio’ (Campo Santo) and

Richard Preston’s article ‘Capturing the Unicorn’ (The New Yorker, April 4, 2005).