from Blue Hole

 

Han van Meegeren licks an envelope like an antidote. It holds a fraudulent receipt to the Reichsmarschall. Through the drawing room window, snow falls into men and angels, soft circles around the garbage cans.

Bittersweet spit coats his tongue with the taste of someone else’s long-stem rose, having run it home to a jar of tepid water on the nightstand. He’s hitched his wagon to that black hole, found the point of his vanishing in the meticulousness of a made-up vision.

Without the medium
the matter is nothing

one big giant grave rubbing

folded into a shim and shoved
under the wobbly tavern table.

The table holds a glowing bowl of lemons, the sunlit clarity of airplane ice, even though it’s snowing. The table exists behind his eyes—he can only see it when they’re closed. He puts on the gestures that mean their subjects like bespoke clothes, but views are always different from behind.

A small fly zags square circles at the room’s center, caught in the warm waves of an eddy. Spunneling with the bathwater, head in his hands, Han chases haloes with the circle of his headlamp.

 

 

 

 

Rather than small, the night sky makes
everything feel horribly important—

the stars have not yet all been named,
the leaves never will be

the humus gathers and tucks up around me.

Rather than glass, perhaps the wall
is a staticky layer of plastic wrap
that clings, dimples and thins,
but won’t admit my finger

nothing happens again

the difference between a tender
impression and damaging ding
is what my back rides up against.

Infinity includes everything
and also different kinds of it.

The universe was behind Door Two
but we didn’t pick it.
Instead, we went with Door One
behind which the dog has gnawed
a good half of the plastic play people

but a small piece of me still feels infinite

turns out words are dull
yet somewhat harder than the medium.

 

 

 

 

Everything might already exist
but it hasn’t all been found—

giant diamonds
old, telling bones and a lot
of the encanto at the core.

I wake among the dead-
gorgeous maples in perfect
lead-tin-yellow and know
the double beauty of fake paintings
is the most I can hope to recreate

(though my eye cream promises
to regenerate my eyes
like the arm of a hapless starfish).

So, please accept this ball
of fuzz and crumbs
I picked from the pile
of my wall-to-wall

old gum
fake nail
a dusting of paper holes

but my headlamp doubles for a halo
and these wings are not without use
under water:

a yellow leaf falls, breaks
a seamless green plane
of pieces of grass

and perspective bends
to bite you on the ass.

That parallel lines can meet
and mean something beyond
what we need them to

that lopped ends and sucked-in
scraps can be patched into
a palpable feeling of time
heaving by

and right off the end of the board.
I think you should try it.

Dear Han van Meegeren,

I want you to wake up
among redwoods, redolent
carpets of needles and stars
self-supplanting all around you.

While the plastic wrap is healing
it gives a little bit for the moment.

The eye never closes,
a lid does. The pupil
black hole.

 

 

 

 

Han van Meegeren rubs a grave he wishes were his own. He curls up inside and dreams in ancient, extinct pigments. But the dreams are drawn two-dimensional curtains—he’s sewn up his jewels inside of his clothes and lives on others’ glints and facets, a vanishing point that rankles like a hangnail.

Before a jury, he paints his last fake masterpiece, a vacant Jesus being consulted by a group of grave doctors. Long lit faces and heavy carmine, ultramarine and lead-tin-yellow draperies offset the umbral recesses of the scene.

Repoussoir of scroll, contents unknown.

Even following his conviction, some experts still believed that a few of van Meegeren’s false works were genuine. The extent of the difference and the degree to which it matters are the penny at the bottom of my bouquet, slowly oxidizing into duplicitous splendor.

Touch the petals with a finger and they all fall down. But a castaway on a cartoon desert island once said, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” then became the waves in a dead-man’s float that swept her off into archipelagoes.

 

Emma Powell / An Elegy for the Honeybee