1080. Back From Market - Eavan Boland

Jean Siméon Chardin, The Provider (LaPourvoyeuse)

Dressed in the colors of a country day -

Grey-blue, blue-grey, the white of seagulls’ bodies -

Chardin’s peasant woman

Is to be found at all times in her short delay

Of dreams, her eyes mixed

Between love and market, empty flagons of wine

At her feet, bread under her arm. he has fixed

Her limbs in colour, and her heart in line.

In her right hand, the hind legs of a hare

Peep from a cloth sack; through the door

Another woman moves

In painted daylight, nothing in this bare

Closet has been lost

Or changed. I think of what great art removes:

Hazard and death, the future and the past,

This woman’s secret history and her loves -

And even the dawn market, from whose bargaining

She has just come back, where men and women

Congregate and go

Among the produce, learning to live from morning

To next day, linked

By a common impulse to survive, although

In surging light they are single and distinct,

Like birds in the accumulating snow,

1079. The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away From the Curb - Sharon Olds

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn’t have by now.

Whatever the world is going to do to him

it has started to do. With a pencil and two

Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and

grapes he is on his way, there is nothing

more we can do for him. Whatever is

stored in his heart, he can use, now.

Whatever he has laid up in his mind

he can call on. What he does not have

he can lack, The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one

folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,

onto itself, and onto itself, until

only a heavy wedge remains.

Whatever his exuberant soul

can do for him, it is doing right now.

Whatever his arrogance can do

it is doing to him. Everything

that’s been done to him, he will now do.

Everything that’s been placed in him

will come out, now, the contents of a trunk

unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine

    light.