Stillleben mit drei Orangen / Still Life With Three Oranges (Cuno Amiet; oil on canvas, 1907-08)

Sherry Johnson

                                       Angles glyphed in softness

to keep the softness from rotting. Somewhere

between form and pleasure; one blindly depthsounds

the length of some pliant, swaying barrier

with the feel of a velvet cordon

snaking a waiting line at the bank. Cold wink

of a metal hasp curved at the end of it. Snap

                      & click & let it slip. Business

is business as they say. As they say. And here

business is oranges. Plated and paint-scaped. Sunk

with such a totality into their names as to sit

nearly umbrageless, echo-less. As the pale pink

money of such little-mouthed flowers, their smudged

work at light-silkening and how they shut up

(so quiet-like) as a group about it.

                                        And what of the punch-card cardboard

postcard’s quadrangle broached counterpoise? Infuses                            

a papery sense into leaves, a beige shrug. The painter’s

equivalency of an area rug. Register a hole-punch

glance just once — then move on. To black area blocked

behind fronds and pot / does not impart a sense of itself

to anything, remains delimited and distant; a knees

-pulled-up-under-the-chin-of-itself black look.

Memento mori for the Eurasian oriole he glimpsed

out of the pleated, flash-shot panes of the east oriel. A screen

                                                                   / screen winging shut and

yellow of feather admixed with split bone, coiled gut; he

angled the thing haphazard on a gash / scraped

once with the trowel and it vanished

as instantly as intimated. Light stayed liquid and brass.

Memento mori for 4 ‘o clock tea. For the jubilant, fleet skiing parties.

Memento mori for the many small lies navigated

in order to accommodate a social ease.

Memento mori for the poor and squalid,

                                                                                 and for those who are without locks.

Memento mori for the oily, fingerprinted scroll of the exhausted

tube of Mummy Brown, — made from the chocolate-coloured, ground-up

remains of 6 separate Egyptians. Bury it with funeral rites in the garden.

Memento mori for the late light diffracted on the snow-crusted

peaks, and for the one who looked up, and — in

                                      looking — plummeted a moment down the mountain with it.

Memento mori for those who died in the mines — extracting the pigments.

Memento mori for the question which stood up defiantly

in the soul, bivouacked a brief time in the ribs, made it

all the way up into the throat’s pink vaults — then promptly died there.

Memento mori for the chrome points

flashing between bearings, the lace collars and volatile smell of wood polish.

Memento mori for the tabby found drowned in the cistern. The soft,

                                                                     limp leadenness of it. Its glassy green gaze.

Memento mori for the yellowed ledger

from the last century, with its 5 water-stained, empty pages.

Memento mori for the frame. And for the casual, flaccid

brushwork accentuating cloth’s tooth. This second hand

                                                            feeling hung on the hook

of an August day when absolutely nothing (everything) was immanent. 

Sherry Johnson is the author of two books of poetry, Pale Grace and Hymns to Phenomena. Her poems have appeared in many journals, magazines and anthologies, most recently in The Malahat Review and forthcoming in CV2 and The Iowa Review. Also a film critic, her articles have appeared in Senses of Cinema, MUBI Notebook, the Swedish academic journal Film International and others.