That one’s some El Greco blond
spandrel cornice all arms
of blue into our late modern light
scoundrel of clouds hotter than
green stones of the city after a day
of sun now gone down, now drawn
down as my bedroom’s blackout curtain
but white’s on the clouds, shock like
a boy is looking at you from across
the street in a crowd packed with dry colors
swirling, dust in sunlight—
and here still as if we had not left at all—
never left—not Toledo—a lifetime of watching
trees fraying into thick brushes
on a hundred canvases, a hundred pigments
of a hundred compositions now hummed
as sloped sounds and a few are swimming back ...
The clouds. The boy. Elsewhere a meadow
river. Shallow water running ahead. Threaded
with tassels scattered into the grasses. And
minnows moving over the bottom, quick,
also as shadows. And the boy goes back into his crowd.