Photo by Pawel Czewinski
Vermeer’s Mixer
Jeffrey Dreiblatt
Some say that Vermeer painted
using optical instruments
to transfer a moment to canvas.
That would certainly help me,
who cannot seem to render a likeness
without distortion.
One eye, always the right,
sits oddly placed, watching
from a bit too high, or vision,
narrowly squeezed.
Perhaps it is my signature.
His, being men and women in
private spaces, with window
to the left,
not for eyes to peer in,
but an opening where light
inches across carefully rendered maps
and turns velvet black to tulip yellow.
In my kitchen, illumination from the right,
refracted by a mixer’s funhouse bowl.
Slatted floor tilts loudly forward,
pitching table and fruit bowl into a domestic slide.
No stillness here.
Jeffrey Dreiblatt
Some say that Vermeer painted
using optical instruments
to transfer a moment to canvas.
That would certainly help me,
who cannot seem to render a likeness
without distortion.
One eye, always the right,
sits oddly placed, watching
from a bit too high, or vision,
narrowly squeezed.
Perhaps it is my signature.
His, being men and women in
private spaces, with window
to the left,
not for eyes to peer in,
but an opening where light
inches across carefully rendered maps
and turns velvet black to tulip yellow.
In my kitchen, illumination from the right,
refracted by a mixer’s funhouse bowl.
Slatted floor tilts loudly forward,
pitching table and fruit bowl into a domestic slide.
No stillness here.