Wendy Barker: “In the Gallery
IN THE GALLERY
All the faces on the canvases, and all
the moving fleshy faces facing the ones flat and framed
on the walls, the living faces shifting
to a glimpse of a hooked nose, dimpled chin, or black
eye with a drift of braided hair covering
a cheek, as these gallery-goers turn to one frame and
then another, as I sift among them, just
another face, and then, suddenly, before me, the largest
canvas in this wide room, one of Monet’s
early Nympheas, petals of the water lilies shifting among
rounded leaves, their stems submerged
in layers of murky water, almost as if moving the way
we are, the way faces from the past
sift into my dreams at night, of some maddening friends
I’d rather forget, and of those whose loss
I grieve, like the woman I sat with in this same museum
five years ago, the two of us speaking
of our long-dead mothers, and now that woman, decades
younger than I, is gone too, though how
her face drifts to me before dawn. And here, right in front
of me: a portrait of a man who looks
so like a man who once held me close, his face engraved
in the frames of my mind, his brown eyes
sifting through this space of gallery-goers drifting in this
white room, the way water lilies, their
colors, shift across a pond’s surface, before they go under.
Wendy Barker‘s sixth full-length collection, One Blackbird at a Time (BkMk Press, 2015), received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. She has also published four chapbooks and a selection of co-translations of the last poems of Rabindranath Tagore, among other books. Individual poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2013. Barker has received an NEA and a Rockefeller fellowship to Bellagio, among other awards. She teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio.