Exile in a Thrift-Store Landscape

Nothing can fully ripen in this place,

since time stood still the moment it was made.

See how the cypresses refuse to bow,

how even the absurd, tidy wheat sheaves

assert their claims on this eternity?

Light, cast from a doubtful, unseen star

just over the horizon’s wobbly line,

will neither brighten nor suddenly dim,

causing the poor misshapen animals

(blue cattle and what could be a donkey)

to ooze their purple shadows forever.

Festering below, in grass they’ll never taste,

the scribbled ruins of some poppies.

It’s fortunate the painter lacked the skill

to render flesh—no badly made farmer

ever appears, so the three olive trees

must prune themselves, and fields remain unplowed.

Better to close your eyes than stare too long

at the distorted and meaningless

hunk of mountain—it’s neither Alpine

nor Appalachian, and no one will ever

try to scale it. Who could survive

in a landscape so devoid of perspective?

This is not Greece, nor Germany, nor France.

In fact, no country’s fixed a border here

because it can’t exist. The soil itself

is wrong, the crops confused, the regions mixed.

Though only a minor decoration

(here the painter indulged himself in black)

the smudge of crow seems right, perched upon

a detail you might easily overlook:

—it’s just an angled ocher slash, really,

but the wooden fence post knows why it’s there:

to remember it was once a tree,

to be sturdy and hold still for the grapes,

those optimistic envoys of late summer

clustered so deep in their leafy shadows

they’re barely visible to the man

who comes to buy the painting over lunch.

He’s just walked twelve blocks, alone in the rain.

In fact, he traveled years to get here, holding

papers from a place you don’t recognize,

on boats you wouldn’t recognize as boats.

His presence here is not entirely legal,

but this is only a thrift store, so no one cares.

He understands the fence post and the grapes,

knows duty and possibility blur

in such a hopeful, unfinished place.

The mountain’s big, but easily toppled.

There’s nothing awful hidden in the ditch.

The animals can’t eat, nor can they die.

The grapes will never ripen, nor be plucked.

Art’s deceptions, not ordinary lies.