I've written for years about the visual arts.
I don't often write poems about that subject.
But some years ago, there was a big Vermeer show
that was going around, which I missed.
A friend of mine sent me the catalog.
And I was leafing through it, and I saw this painting
that I've seen so many times in the Metropolitan, the Girl
with the Pearl Earring.
And so I began.
Words began stirring, and this thing turned up.
I live in San Francisco, and I live in the Haight.
Haight Street is just two and a half blocks down--
thank god-- the hill, from where I live.
So this is "Girl with Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer."
"He put the spirit essence, the light pip,
not only in each eye's albumen concentrate of starlight,
but must have been taught how to do that by first finding it
in the pearl.
He posed, then corrected, in dusty studio light that
pounced on the window, behind which
sits the cheeky girl, pearl, pear- and apple-blossom cheeks.
A fake description, naturally, of their plain fleshiness,
drably golden.
And her lips, from Haight Street's darlings.
Nose studs, jacket studs, girls with that kind of eye.
One by the ATM machine, casual, juicy, and so fair,
a Netherlandish type.
Panhandling strangers.
Pomegranate seed ball bearings agleam in her nose.
Pearls, not sea-harvested, but imagined.
Seen, put there by a certain need and fancy,
because love says it's so.
Picture that.
Picture this."