2 Poems by Eva Heisler

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A Poem for Painters Conceptual Artists

—after John Wieners

The hand bereft.

How can the wall show it?

I look for grief, or mischief.

The floor is scratched with want of story.

Only in the talking comes a shape.

~

Recalling an old painting and its sweetness— 

the afternoon cruising on our arms.

The frame is worth more than the picture.

Just looking—

driven by infirmities over which I have no control.

~

A conceptual artist rents the spare room.  

Testing shows him to be forgetful 

but he can smell 

the difference between Fuji film and Polaroid. 

Rattle me/ drench me / shoot me in an old yellow.

~

Played at door.

Played at signage. 

Played at test pattern.

Perfectly square frames are difficult to sell 

because there are few perfectly square paintings. 

~

Luck hides in the lines of the palm. 

See how he holds, is holding now,

the pose.  Who disrobes the future, 

who archives the sound of endangered waters.

But suppose it’s important in the wrong way?

~

I stagger among wall labels,

carry pencil stubs,

am calibrated by the squall of a shiny object.

Look around, he says, but don’t look hard.

No escape into sfumato. 

A Brief History of the Halo                                                                             

Begins with a cloud.  Aerial chariot 

inside which gods plot. 

~

And then a right hand 

emerges from the cloud to part red waters,

to announce a dream is heard.  

~

And then that hand 

is drawn in the upper corner of a medieval manuscript,

just outside the frame, at the edge of visibility.  

~

And then the hand, its parting of sky and sorting of souls,

stiffens into ornament, 

a band of metallic relief above the head.

~

In Padua, I wait in an atmosphere-controlled antechamber 

as my body’s microclimate adjusts before allowed entry 

into Giotto’s blue-barreled vault where I am startled 

by the coarse impastoed haloes—rotted with time 

and the fickle chemistry of gold leaf. Black holes, 

the haloes. 

~

And then the halo invades the house. Any object 

might bear the mark of a threshold.  

Wicker fire screen behind the head of a woman reading.

Copper kettle on a hook above Gabriel’s head.   

How beautiful the curled peel of lemon.

~

And then the halo is meteorological—

thread of light leaking from another dimension.

~

I face him, my back to the window. He faces the lake, 

the left lens of his glasses reflecting water.  As he speaks, 

I stare at the bright white square on his glasses.

He assumes I am looking into his eyes.  

~

The halo is the opposite of coincidence.

~

An inventory of haloes:

…………….moths at dawn along the river; 

…………….a low-lying cloud tumbling through the vineyards;

…………….the fog through which I find my way to you;

…………….the kiss—its aftertaste, a halo in my mouth. 

~

I overhear the Icelanders whispering. The only words 

I make out are ljós (light) and krónur (money).  I drift, 

thinking of the lightness of money, the light of women 

who bemoan the cost of light in a land of pink, shimmering 

midnight sun. I ask, later, what was said about money for light. 

Hildur’s grandmother, I’m told, and her ljósakróna  (light crown): 

a chandelier.  

Each noun is a saltshaker filled with glitter.  I don’t understand 

but I see the glow at the edges of a word.  

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Eva Heisler has published two books of poetry: Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic and Drawing Water. Honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award and fellowships at MacDowell and Millay Arts. Poems have appeared in Bomb, Colorado Review, Heavy Feather Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest.  

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17 July 2023