Fenway Press

“VERMEER PAINTS MY MOTHER”

(DIGITAL VERSION WITH HYPERLINKS)

READ THIS AT YOUR OWN SPEED, AND WHEN YOU SEE A SUPERSCRIPT NUMBER, DOUBLE-CLICK ON IT TO SEE THE PAINTING BY JOHANNES VERMEER THAT IS RELEVANT TO THAT PASSAGE IN THE POEM. TO ORDER THE BOOK ITSELF, SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.

…………………………………………………………

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.

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