The Vermeer Suite
Wind Ridge Books, 2015
Art and Poetry. A collection of 18 original poems based on individual masterpieces by 17th Century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer with exquisite, museum-quality reproductions of the paintings that inspired them.
The poems of Daniel Lusk in this collection provide a fresh, literary complement to a selection of masterpieces by 17th Century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Based on the work of eminent art historians and his own, first-hand observations of these beloved paintings, his imaginative poetry offers admirers of Vermeer a bridge between the analysis and insights of scholars and their own direct experience that may enhance the pleasure of contemplating these intimate and timeless works.
Limited Edition available only from Phoenix Books
Two poems from The Vermeer Suite:
Yellow
—after Johannes Vermeer’s painting,
“Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window,” c. 1657
Some say yellow is for lovers.
I say every day this girl
clothes herself in raiment, yellow silk
and midnight blue, binds up her hair,
to read again in yellow light at end of day
his letter, crumpled now
for he is far away this too-long time.
The shining yellow curtain that reflects
the twilight lends some privacy
or even holiness. But see
how the russet drape over
and darkly behind the window
to permit the wayward wind
frames her ghosted face
and white cotton chemise as if
we see inside. The wan sadness
barely evident around her eyes,
distracts our gaze
from the shadow at her nape.
Does she move her lips to keep
the words enlivened on her breath?
He says his skin is turning brown
from eating figs. It is a joke.
What if love is easy there?
Ink begins to fade from so much reading.
He was a boy with a sweet
French name. The skin of his belly
smooth as broth.
What began as simple pleasure
in their bodies, ripens now
the way these fruits have ripened,
huddled in the bowl. She
has eaten half a peach and left
the better half, its pit exposed,
like a votive candle, for his return.
Women who wait like this
might bring a journey, even war, to end
with their unwavering prayers.
Lord knows, they pay.
Memoir
—after Johannes Vermeer’s painting,
“The Little Street,” c. 1659-1660
It was a summer day. No,
it was all the summer days
in the dog-eared picture book
of memory.
Brick buildings partly shuttered,
blind mullioned windows,
a bright alley to a scullery,
a doorway to the dark.
And Oma mending
with an eye on children playing
sticks and stones on the doorstep tiles.
Mother at the cistern
doing household chores.
Perhaps a cart has just gone by,
wooden wheels trundling the bricks
of the canal bridge. Mute trickle
in the ditch, our own fickle past stirring
behind these bricks and windows
—a sense of “once” in Delft we may recall.
But pause one moment: This
is not a real street, these shutters can’t,
these conflated houses, these people
nobody who ever lived.
Those recessive roofs, that isosceles of sky
and diphthong of passing clouds;
the diminishing size of the windows,
inverted triangle of receding generations?
This is the architecture of remembrance.
Not a portrait of the past
but a notion—fixed and enigmatic.
Tone without plot.
No shadows. No backstory. No next.
We may animate the margins outside
our momentary view with passing barrows,
a coot hen on a nest of sticks
above the lapping water of the canal,
the slopman’s salient voice
and iambic ti-clop of his horse’ hooves.
The arch barking of a dog.
Or fabricate the creaking sails
of a windmill at the heart of town.
But the little street is mute
except for the murmur of our own
receding past, which lingers
like these broken roof tiles, masked
by the whitewash of forgetfulness,
piquant as the point of light in that far facade.