What is it about a room
that ends with a wall of windows, soaked in exterior light, surely a full moon? Much of the interior space empty. A china hutch we can’t see into. An empty mantel, large painting on the wall above, or is it a framed mirror pulling the outside in?
A glide of light enters the fireplace, as if kindling a blaze there. Rectangular table for two set with one clear drinking glass, an empty breadbasket, a vase not nearly full of flowers. A white lace tablecloth hangs further down one side, inches from floorboards the color of the sea, each pointing outside. And why wouldn’t they? The trees lure us with their green-black gleam.
Moonlight flows over everything, streams through high stained-glass windows, hurls hazy pink and orange splotches through the gauzy tablecloth.
They’ve carried chairs to the patio, gaze at midnight blue between branches, pinpricked with stars or fireflies Luminous floor planks wait for the couple’s return. Will they dance on their wide expanse?
~ Inspired by the painting “Room in Early Summer” 2018-19 by Simeon Nijenhuis
9 thoughts on "What is it about a room"
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I love how you draw the reader into this with your questions, Karen. And also how the moonlight hurls those colors! Thanks.
Lovely! “A glide of light” is really nice.
“Rectangular table for two set with one clear drinking glass, an empty breadbasket, a vase not nearly full of flowers.” Something about the movement of that line really strikes me; it’s strange because the images are incomplete, one glass, an empty basket, a sparse vase; but the rhythm and the movement bear a feeling of completion, as though there’s an acceptance of it exactly how it is. The floor boards, each pointing outside, is also, albeit something that should seem so obvious, a profound observation; akin to me marching back and forth, from porch to den, and feeling like every step I took placed me in another world, and other marvelous sentiments of the bleary lines that distinguish what’s out and what’s in I experienced in the “throes of St. Anthony’s fire.”
Thank you. Beautiful poem. I got ahead of myself and forgotten to mention that.
This is a lovely poem.
Thanks for your comments, Nancy, Sylvia, Rivka, & Shaun!
So much about this poem to like–the way it begins and ends with a question, the lovely imagery, the sounds like “hazy” and “gauzy,” and the tablecloths pointing outside “And why wouldn’t they? The trees lure us with their green-black gleam.”
Really nice prose piece, Karen. Great details. And I’ll go look up the art.
Ahh.