“VERMEER PAINTS MY MOTHER”
(DIGITAL VERSION WITH HYPERLINKS)
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…………………………………………………………
VERMEER PAINTS MY MOTHER
He closes the shutters to show
the camera obscura at work:
across spidery cracks in the plaster
images from outside pour
from a pinprick beam, light
unspooling through dust motes
like colored smoke:
blues, yellows, pearls he will make
more luminous
and exact than life.
He has often fed the hungry dark.
He agrees to paint my mother.
*
Not, I say, like the anonymous women
who scrub the Little Street in Delft.[1]
Their faces are shuttered and blank
as they clean the brickwork.
They are children of war and toil.
This portrait should be more like your others—,
women who are assured and self-sufficient.
True, my mother was also a child of war,
a lucky US civilian out of the working class
married to a brilliant lawyer.
During the war, her hand poured out
cups of rationed sugar. Smoke
from burning cities on other continents
carried to our safe US kitchen.
The smell of war stuck to our clothes, our nights.
My father’s portion was to return
from the Pacific war bald from malaria,
a stranger to himself.
They arrived by ship in Yokohama
with three children
not long after the bombs stopped.
*
Delft’s black and blue sky [2]
a storm is passing
the ground is soaked.
One far roof takes new sun
in a blaze of yellow.
Two married women, or war widows
dressed in darkness
stand like pilgrims or rain clouds
on the silvery canal bank
opposite the city’s spires.
Painting this skyline required
memory: Vermeer had to recall
this scene from before
the explosion in the powder magazine
that flattened and burned the whole quarter.
It’s a postcard from a place lost in time,
a homage to the longing for peace
against the wartime pressure of violence.
There is always a felt absence in Vermeer.
He offers a safe place in an unsafe time,
like a room in a good house in a dangerous place.
The calm is in part the quiet of absence and loss.
Yokohama in 1946 was a shantytown
built on the edge of bomb craters,
full of missing people, undetonated bombs,
the boot dug out of mud with the foot inside.
Everything coated with the fine ash
from the wood and paper homes
burned by incendiaries. The air still stank
of napalm.
No dogs or cats, all eaten in the hungry time.
People remembered green hills and a blue harbor
before the air raid sirens and mercilessness.
*
The Woman in Blue reads a letter[3]
my mother too reads my father’s letter from New Guinea.
A Japanese sniper hid in a shallow cave.
They called in the flame thrower.
All that remained was a stench
and the smoking soles of two burnt sandals,
hand-made from an old rubber tire.
*
The calm paintings hold more than their share
of soldiers. War is ever-present, like thin smoke.
The subject sits serenely
on a mahogany chair—but look again:
the chair is carved with ravening lions,
their jaws open. An old map
on the wall above the sitter
is scarred with contested terrain.
It’s a battle map of a country
ravaged by war.
*
Bread, early light, shabby sills
in disrepair. The sturdy arms
of the woman pour the morning’s milk[4]
She is intent, yet lost in thought,
eyes half open—
bread, milk, bowl, table, coffee
artifacts of each day’s beginning.
My mother never missed a breakfast.
*
Girl Asleep at Vermeer’s table[5]
in time the sitter dozes off,
her mask falling.
Then the painter strikes.
Vermeer watches my mother
start to sleep. He picks up the brush.
*
Vermeer’s Procuress and Client[6]
is a celebration, it seems—
no condemnation of their trade:
an appreciation of their intimacy,
the electricity between them.
Your father should have been a bishop,
my mother says.
She was in love, I thought, with Father John Crowe,
the handsome Irish missionary in Kamakura.
He sometimes walked through the red lantern
district in Yokohama near the bombed docks.
When whores propositioned, he tipped his hat,
and said, in his polite Japanese,
thank you, madam, not tonight.
*
Mirrors: tin and mercury—even the finest
of old mirrors betrays some shadow
or softness, a smoky darkening under the surface.
The map above the smiling girl has
blue land, a brown sea
girl open to world
man blinkered like a warhorse.
Vermeer’s mind taps each possibility,
as though posing each in a mirror:
woman in the light of a man’s attention,
woman left to her own thoughts,
man in the light of a woman’s attention—
and, rarely, man alone in thought.
Even more rare: the couple, happily flirting.
What of Blake’s lineaments?
Gratified desire?
A fine bishop, my mother repeats.
*
The couple stand at a virginal together
The virginal like a casket
open for a Catholic funeral
the man gazing at the woman playing,[7]
and she, without his knowing,
glances at him in the mirror as he watches.
Uncanny, the knowings
and secret sightings in a household,
the mysterious capacity of the soul to withhold
or give itself.
*
Merciful, light will never tell
on the servant girl with the turban–
she fastens her mistress’ pearl earring[8]
and asks across the centuries
how she looks.
Riches and want gather
in the luster of her eye.
Has she just turned toward us,
or is she turning away,
leaving little echoes of light?
Close-up, the master has painted
a small eye inside the pearl.
I am lost in the mother-of-pearl world
the shine of wet lips, parted.
She calls you and me into her story,
intimate, impossible to share:
a closeness that cannot be,
product of oil, paint, shellac.
The pearl from the sea
looks like a tear. In the house,
rooms are tidal, emptying,
filling with loss and its opposite, delight.
All I long for stands in front of me,
no way to reach out.
Each time I look at her I think,
Please don’t go
I said this often to my mother
when I was small.
Looking at the girl, I feel an old glad grief,
like music from a silent instrument,
a song of a life on a broken wing:
snapshot of a radiant child on a swing
who is no longer alive.
*
As Vermeer paints, they talk.
She flirts, makes cracks
about life, terrible hospital food.
Any guest of my mother gets a feast.
When they break for lunch
Vermeer’s eyes widen at his luck:
warmed up osso bucco, stroganoff.
They talk, gossip, really, insider Catholic matters.
She tells him how the nuns
made her practice on a silent piano.
She does not mind shocking him
with her irreverence.
Proud and prickly as she is,
she is a woman often at odds with the truth.
holding on to her toxic family secret unto death.
And jealous. At first she disliked both the wives
her two sons married—neither was worthy,
though she came to admire them.
The great sorrow in my childhood’s house:
she could not mother her adopted daughter well.
Preferring her sons, she lacked a sense of justice,
basic fairness toward my sister Liz,
I could say more—
but she is my mother. I love her.
I miss her, her competent hands,
the acts that lifted her above herself,
her style and comic intelligence,
her close love and attention
to the world’s surfaces,
words, and fine textures.
Finishing the painting or this poem
will be losing her again,
I say to Vermeer. He nods.
He knows.
*
A summer night, another party.
My mother comes into my room
in her new silk dress to kiss me goodnight.
She sits on the bed. I smell her perfume,
feel her weight
on my feet under the blanket.
Please don’t go.
Earlier that day we walk to the beach
in Kamakura: I show her the great mystery barge
brought high up on the beach
by the typhoon. My brother and I
and two Japanese friends, Yamada and Kase,
explored the damaged mazy interior
and found one intact room with a porthole
through which the shine off the sea
poured, the waves reflected in splashed
curls of light against the bulkhead.
Imagine: a secret boys’ club
to hide in and sit together
to make up games and stories.
Someone will claim it sooner or later, she warns.
Nothing lasts forever.
She shakes her head, admiring,
never asking who the big barge belongs to.
You boys!
She sees us, and what we do,
what we make from a wreck
tossed ashore by the storm.
Shaking her head,
Look at you!
*
I ask Vermeer about the problem of the male gaze.
For example, I say, an artist long after you, named Degas,
draws nude images powered by the erotic
and contempt for women.
Then late in the day, a series of astonishing works:
women alive in their own lives,
alone, unguarded. Late Degas paintings
look like purifications, often involving the bath,
by a misogynist who knew he had a lot to answer for.
What would you say, I ask, about women in your paintings?
Judge for yourself about me—Vermeer
sounds hurt, as he cleans his brush.
*
Where did her confidence come from?
Vermeer wants to know. I say I’m not sure—
she was both the favorite of and the chief rebel
against her own formidable mother, a domestic tyrant
who was a Catholic feminist, a school principal,
and politician, the first woman elected
to the Pennsylvania state Democratic committee,
an ally in politics of the United Mine workers,
a reformer who helped end child labor in the state.
Rose Mary (my mother) and her mom
fought like mismatched cats. Starting
as a young girl she ran away for weeks at a time,
staying two blocks over with her best friend,
in an Italian family where she learned
how to be that rare thing
among our Wilkes-Barre Irish, a world-class cook.
A skilled nurse in her youth,
my mother was the only college graduate in her family.
In Japan she learned to be an expert textile buyer,
assessing Irish linen, British tweed, Chinese silk—
a budding career might take her around the world.
My parents fought about this. She gave it up.
Vermeer thanks me for telling him all this.
The forms of a work, he says,
come alive not only from what you show,
but from what you know and hold back.
*
In her favorite dress of slub silk,
my mother, no bruise showing,
wipes the counter with her apron,
and uses a chilled wire whip
on cream for salmon mousse—
another fiesta for old friends.
*
There is Nick Cortiglia’s pastel of her, young,
beautiful, displeased.
There is no painting of my father,
only one really good photograph,
out of a vanished black and white world—
shadowed and dark, like a work in oil.
He leans forward as if to explain.
The composition lifts the eye
to the mirror above his head
matter and presence twine
upward, wisps rise
from the cigarette in his hand toward
motes trapped
by sun or other light. He and I were strangers.
A painting would show
a glow of red at the tip of his cigarette,
the essential spot of color in an old Japanese print
that gives the viewer distance.
*
The two men in Delft
who resemble heroes
specialize in distances.
One is the Geographer.[9]
the other the Astronomer.[10]
*
I question Vermeer about one of his works:
the Allegory of Painting[11]:
he is surely not the artist he spoofs
in this strange comic scene:
Decked out like a fop, the artist works
with a weirdly garbed model.
Model and painter are not intimates,
but they, like my mother and Vermeer,
are kidding, dressing up, having fun,
making a small carnival of jokes at the expense
of the rule-driven world.
*
I ask Vermeer about the moment
when the face on the canvas takes shape,
and looks at him, raising questions,
making claims.
They start to talk back, he says.
Like your mother.
*
The spaces he draws are haunted
by silences and empty chairs,
envelopes of quiet air, charged
electricity in a room whose shining seconds
and charmed voices are fated to disappear:
pleasures and sorrows that evaporate
and rise like smoke.
Rituals of loss.
I tell Vermeer about Mrs. Ramsey, begging:
life, please stand still— here. He nods.
A sprig of mountain laurel opens me
to one Japanese winter:
my mother’s hair, coal-black—
blazing against the sun-high snow drifts
at the mountain pass near Gora—
for the first time I glimpse her as a girl.
*
Serene, ecstatic, or mad,
a woman is weighing the true
of a shining slender balance–
jewelry and gold bits on a table–
a high window’s slit
is the only visible light.
Our gaze unites with hers.
We too assess the balance itself
its accuracy, our eye to her eye.
Vermeer was, like my family, Catholic,
in his case a convert. He lived in a Protestant place
at a time of sectarian war and the turn
in his own church toward cruel dogma
and absolutes.
I ask him how he squares
damnation and deserved suffering
with his love for the world’s bright surfaces,
the uniqueness of the women
he draws, the small paradises he finds
in single moments of life here and now.
On the wall behind the woman and balance,[12]
Vermeer includes a painting within the painting:
a dim portrait of Michael, the stern angel
who comes to judge and sort sinners
from the saved on the Last Day.
I was almost named Michael, I start to say.
But my mother wants to tell this story:
She recalls how she had a hard birth with me,
wanted to name me Michael, but was still
on strict hospital rest. My father
and uncle Gus took the baby
to the church for baptism, stopping off at a bar.
After some considerable time they resumed,
having decided I should be named, not Michael,
but rather Joseph, after my father.
The baptized name could not be undone.
My mother, furious, resolved to call me
Jay not Joseph, which suited me,
as I never warmed to my dad,
and only really knew him after the war—
and by then I was 6 years old.
The happy woman with the balance
Vermeer has painted weighs the things of this life
and asks, who am I to judge?
Her balance is not a tool of inquisition:
it’s a mystic home appliance
magic, like a golden cricket:
a thing airy and yet practical, with the graces
that come from daily use in a material world–
beautiful like a bridge, or bicycle, or bowl of milk,
or spoon or patch of silk or sonnet—
a means of curious inquiry, precise judgements,
finding facts at this moment right now.
My mother and I love her—Vermeer’s heretic
who dissents from the gloom
of absolutes and damnation and eternity.
She will be our saint, if anybody is.
*
The portrait doesn’t in the end look like my mother.
To be honest, it’s odd, it’s of a lace maker.[13]
Vermeer, a bit distracted, apologizes,
says he won’t charge us for it.
Like many men he has found my mother
a siren, enchantress and flirt.
He has listened with delight to the flow
of her questions and words.
She has never once bored him.
Both she and her favorite sister, Mary,
her life’s best friend, are storytellers.
Each has an ear for a stranger’s way with speech.
They are connoisseurs of words and gestures,
performers in language who enjoy
being center-stage, masterful
in repartee, wisecrack, imitation, and insult.
My father also brought to our family
precision, authority, and a flair for words,
a similar love for a good story—
though his stories were true.
Conversation and quarrels played
across the walls of our dining room
like moving lights. Our dinner table
sounded like an opera or political convention.
One way a painting can never be like my mother
is that it cannot speak.
*
Still, I like her very much,
this imagined woman
Vermeer has found in my mother.
She is easy to love.
Her strong fingers tug
on threads for piecework.
I admire her best
of all of Vermeer’s storied
domestics—the little,
squinting lace maker.
Everything in the painting
is a bit out of focus—
except for the two strands of thread
she is holding taut in a cat’s cradle.
The design might be too intricate,
her eyesight failing, the thread
not quite right. The arrangement
as usual in Vermeer
is another story we cannot know,
but are nonetheless asked to imagine,
fabricate, sew, or cook.
Felt absences and things left unsaid
give life to the forms.
It’s not her swollen face
we stare at, it’s the thread, its little V
standing out against her thick fingers
the place where all strands join—
we concentrate on it
as though it were a small being
with its own beating heart
its own moment and life.
Beautifully wrong,
she is one of his late
women, her head engrossed
by knowledge or deformity
With her pride and faults,
her self-absorption,
someone loves her,
begs her
Please don’t go.
……………………………………………………………………………..
Notes
This poem is ekphrastic, a word for a poem that takes off from another work of art. My hope and belief is that in the end it swings clear of the Vermeer paintings. The reproductions in the Wikipedia entries cited below are of good quality and may deepen the experience of the poem, and will surely add to the reader’s pleasure. But my main goal has been to rely on my words, not Vermeer’s images.
I owe a big intellectual debt to the writings of Edward Snow and Lawrence Weschler, whose profound insights about Vermeer’s art I have gratefully pillaged.
“VERMEER PAINTS MY MOTHER”
A LONG POEM BY JAY FEATHERSTONE. ($10 includes shipping and handling)
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