-after Mary Connelly’s Love’s Illusion
That white picket fence in the foreground—
it never existed in my yard, crabgrass
and privet hedge instead; and a second
story was unheard of in the town
unless you were a Hopper print. That
silver fish arising from the depths—out
of ours, only minnows and crappies moved
in the algae-green depths of the dammed-up
lake—where deeper still, houses, junkyards,
pre-War cars, lay drowned and dreaming
beside older river channels—over which flowed
twilight coming down, like here, over
a couple dressed for the theatre, fox
draped over her shoulder-padded shoulders,
standing beside the Ford’s running board—
and the artist, arranging the pose.
—Robin Chapman
Robin Chapman’s most recent book is Six True Things (Tebot Bach, 2016), poems of growing up in the Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, TN.
Copyright 2017, Robin Chapman