Mark Seidl lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he works as a rare-books librarian. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Unbroken Journal, New Delta Review, and elsewhere.
Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Jug
You want pure
attention like hers
to whatever is
going on in
the cool pearl light
outside the window,
or to the light itself,
no thought for the jug
or the thirst that put
her hand to it, so
that when the darkness,
now ebbed back
into the corner,
quiet as a napkin
dropped over a knife,
seeps out again,
blackens the air
as ink a glass
of water, and all
the loves you
thought you’d knocked
silent start tapping
their ciphers on
the whitewashed cells
of your heart, you’ll
feel it along
your hairs sleek
as the black cuff
riding up her
arm as she eases
open the window
one last inch.
A Clean White Towel
You and the one who will be near
you on the subway car as it
shudders down its line as usual,
you are washing in an inch
of cool water, one of you your face,
the other your neck and feet.
You each dry yourself
with a clean white towel.
Then you stand looking at your shirts.
One of you knows immediately
the shirt to wear. The other
touches the shirts, sets them
swaying on their hangers,
and thinks of worshippers in
the slow part of a service,
the preacher warming up, only
just starting to dab his brow
with a white handkerchief,
the spirit not there, not quite,
but close, closing in with its white
light and tongues, which doesn’t
mean you aren’t thinking of
shirts and coats, socks and
pleated slacks, and of the tie,
black in shades you’ve never seen,
that can pull them all together.
