by Gail Mazur
We were two figures in a landscape,
in the middle distance, in summer.
In the foreground, twisty olive trees,
a mild wind made the little dry leaves tremble.
Then, of course, the horizon,
the radiant blue sky.
(The maker was hungry for light,
light silvered the leaves, a stream.)
I liked to think, for your sake,
the scene was Italian, 17th century. …
Viewed from here, we resembled one another
though in truth we were unalike—
and we were tiny, he’d kept us small
so the painting would be landscape, not anecdote.
We were made things, deftly assembled
but beginning to show wear—
you, muscular, sculptural,
and I was I, we were different, we had a story.
On good days we found comedy in that,
pratfalls and also great sadness.
Sun moved across the sky and lowered
until you, then I, were in shadow, bereft.
The Renaissance had ended—
we’d long known we were mortal.
In shadow, I held the wild daisies and cosmos
we’d been gathering for the table.
Then the sky behind us pinked and enflamed
the landscape where we were left
to our own reinvention, two silhouettes
who still had places they meant to travel,
who were not abstractions—had you pricked them
they’d have bled, alizarin crimson.
I wanted to walk by myself awhile
but I’d always been afraid to lose you
and the naked olive groves were hovering
as if to surround you.
That was the problem:
I craved loneliness; I needed the warmth of love.
If no one looks at us, do we or don’t we disappear?
The landscape would survive without us.
When you’re in it, it’s not landscape
any more than the horizon’s a line you can stand on.
-March 2009
Gail Mazur, Figures in a Landscape from “Figures in a Landscape” (University of Chicago Press, 2011).