Vernissage

What would I exhibit? I’ll do watercolors

of Ukraine, the misty Black Sea, five souls rising

from the Square, transparent horned grebes or bitterns,

death easy to portray rising, the sky ruddy

as the cheeks of freed prisoners. All of this hung

from gallery walls in Prague, with first-time portraits

of my mother and her five children, including

the first Alice, dead infant, her face beginning

to pale. But there are a few smiles, someone saying

“cheese,” and near the fire exit two untitled

studies of twilight on a lagoon, where redness

extinguishes blue, a blurry cormorant sitting

on top of a post, an impression of drying wings,

a fountain across the way spewing its whiteness

for the parched and bewildered. But why should

these pictures neighbor others of palmetto fronds?

A bent green and yellow so shy on canvases

of gray air, so timid in their natures, so tiredly here.

I nod a promise of a much later finissage

with chilled wine. The fiddling of Bach. Maybe

Debussy’s La Mer.