Eat Mangos

On your first day
in your blue dress you put on the projector a portrait of
the artist and Thomas Cole, in a landscape of shadow.
They stood poised against the irrevocable gesture of the wilderness,
like two geese in front of an endless lake;
you said someday we too would come to understand
that destiny.

And so we understood it
the way Hawthorne understood it, voiceless
like a morning at Walden Pond, glimpsed it
through the transparent eye of Ralph Waldo Emerson
and the snowy curtains
of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lover’s house–
but I never understood why you
came to understand it
much sooner than any of us.

So it is fitting that three years later
I find myself in front of a John Frederick Kensett
in a gallery at Vassar College; I think of your red hair.
The ships set out across a harbor of pale sails
like so many lost teeth:
the houses stand small and inconspicuous against the black rock,
and somewhere a steam train
coughs and tosses up pillows of smoke as if
scattering your ashes all over the waterfront.
It is cold on this side of the Hudson;
fall and its golden pageant ended early this year,
the earth and I are bound by a constitution of snow.
We stand knee-deep in wonder
at the edge of a darkened wood,
where no book can usher us 
through a world sleeping deep beneath its own white weight,
like a page left blank. 

And as I draw upon that nameless threshold,
that quiet sublime,
it helps somehow to know that you, so lifelike,
have already crossed it.