Well, I think these are a suite of poems.
The first one is called "Art and Life."
And it started as a poem written out of envy,
because I feel like my wife has greater powers of concentration
than I do.
And it ended up being a poem about making up
with the milkmaid in the Vermeer painting.
[LAUGHTER]
"Art and Life."
"Often melancholy when my love is otherwise engaged.
You know that milkmaid in Vermeer?
Entirely absorbed in the act of pouring
a small stream of white milk shocking in the Moritshuis
museum in The Hague to see how white it was.
As seeing people sometimes reading their poetry
or singing in a chorus, you think
you see the soul is an animal going about its business.
A squirrel, its coat sheening toward autumn,
stretching its body down the slim branch
to gather the last bright haw from a Hawthorne tree,
testing the branch with its weight,
stilling as it sinks and then, gingerly reaching out a paw.
Animal attention is the least ambivalent thing there is
and so, you honor it, love it, even.
That her attention turned away from you is so alive
and you are melancholy, nevertheless.
It is best of course to be the one engaged
and being thought of.
Best to be the pouring of the milk.
In The Hague in the employees cafeteria,
I wondered who the restorer was.
The efficient, young woman and the boxy expensive Japanese
coat picking at a dish of cottage cheese
and by some act of mental compromise, a pastry.
The sugar of the pastry long before she
woke up and suffered its agony in the oven.
She seemed the person who had counted up the cost
and decided what she'd settle for.
It was there in the way her soft abstracted mouth
received the bits of bread and the placid sugars.
Or the older man, thinning brown hair, brown tweed coat,
brown buckskin shoes, like the place where dust and sunset
meet and disappear.
Or the whip thin guy with slicked back black hair
and the scarified zigzag flash of lightning at the temple.
I didn't know if there was a type.
I wanted to interview him or her, what
do you do with your life?
I am an acolyte.
I peel time with infinite care in thin strips of pigment
from 300-year-old canvas.
I make the milk, a milk that flows from the gray-brown pitch
--
paint of a picture held by a woman, young rose and tender
yellow for the cheeks.
The light is lucky enough to seem
to touch by a certain window that refracts it.
I am the servant of a gesture so complete, a body so at peace,
it has become a thought entirely unreadable by you or anyone
else and infinitely to be desired
and certainly not possessed.
Has anyone ever told you, I think
it must be the copper haired woman in the coat whos saying
this, and she's speaking to me that you
resemble a bit those sad face harlequins of Picasso.
Are you American or English?
The man with the black hair must be a curator.
He's the only one who thinks he is a work of art.
[LAUGHTER]
Everywhere in The Hague, the low lying smell of sea salt,
we don't know a thing about the mother of Vermeer.
Obviously, he displaced her nipple there,
took the whole Madonna tradition,
turned it into milk and light by some meticulous habit of mind,
the placid geometries of composition worked in him.
It's not Vermeer who interests us
in any case, strong Dutch body, almost tender
light, the plainness of the room, the rich, red rub.
Her skin reddened a little from the roughness of the towel,
perhaps picks up at the river thrust
of what long stares in you toward what dark
and what days grateful afterward.
One of you touches a vein in the other's neck,
feels the pulse there as a shock.
The current of a rigored river or the drawing down this hill.
Who wants Amida's Western Paradise when
there is all this world for tongue to taste,
fingers to touch, small hairs, like spuds simply falling
on another body's arms and legs and lower back.
And so, you talk.
Always, the other shock them of a singular
lived life, a mother in a rest home, maybe a difficult person
grievous, somehow or vindictive, gossip of the other servants,
a brother who works as a hosteler
and has grand plans, that not entirely trustworthy girlfriend
who is given to taking small advantages.
You listen.
You have learned long ago the trick
of not thinking what you're going to say next
when someone else is speaking.
Part of you drinks her in like milk.
Part of you begins to notice that she's trying out
self-deceptions in an account of some difficulty lazily
formulated.
You watch her shake her head suddenly in self-correction.
You've noticed she has a mind that wants to get things right.
That tremor of her body makes a nuzzling motion
all along your flank.
And you reach down to feel it again,
the wetness which is what we have been given instead
of the luminosity of paint.
Afterward, she begins to speak in one of those tracks,
the mind returns to when it's on its feet
again, of Hans the butler, how he bullies the girls,
and prays vigorously in the kitchen
at hourly intervals on Sundays.
Now, she's getting dressed.
It is Sunday.
You've agreed to call the cab and take
her to see her mother up in Gronigen. She's grateful,
a little teary, makes the first small gesture of possession,
brushing off your coat.
Outside, you can hear the hoof beats of shod horses
on the cobbles.
This is the moment when the burden of another person's life
seems insupportable.
By love, help.
Get me out of this mess.
We all want to be reborn incessantly.
But actually, doing it.
Have you noticed?
Begins to seem redundant.
It was the whiteness of the milk,
I mean the paint, that moved me so.
The whiteness."
[APPLAUSE]