Smithereens Press Chapbooks The Sea Path by Ciarán O'Rourke | Page 9

Fresh Air
(Winslow Homer, 1878)
The wind grows new forever
on this hill-top, as I watch
the leaves swim backwards
in their cave-deep daub
of cloud behind you, loving
how the soar of sun you stand in
perfects the bright dial
of your shoe-buckles, and spills
into the lapse your hands inhabit
quietly as shells. The greatest
loveliness might be now,
though, when I see slowly
this sudden freshness has heaved
through everything the portrait
pictures, except your gaze
– you are here and elsewhere
in the same escaping breath.
Or else imagining then, after,
that perhaps you wake to it
when the picture finishes,
this ordinary thought you hold,
which the painter wondered
into sunlit nearness, so
you are real and remote
in the way that gull-shape is,
lingering high above
your dreaming head,
flung to the world
in a veer of blue.
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