Anonymity, by Carol Alexander

Person Under a Tree, by Pierre Bonnard (France), 1925.

Anonymity

 For a day or so, this was everything to me,
foregrounding her who would be basic to me as breath,
the turquoise of the traveling coat, tawny summer skin.
See the cobalt gentled in the tree trunk like bamboo.
I may have botched the picture in keeping to the literal,
the blue column parallel to the tree, but I know this woman's path,
the waiting to be carried away with her round valise and hat,
very far away from  dull Saint-Amand-Montrond.
Or maybe from a dry village somewhere in North Africa;
she is so like a woman I saw rising like a column from the sand.
My careless muse possesses, beyond her beauty, so very little.
It's August and the turning of the leaves is well begun;
see how the yellow sheds light on a wall where small figures wait.
But she, she is on her way to Paris to live among the lindens,
the cold reflection of the Seine, in a house with an iron grille.
I will help her across the street, love and neglect her, wed.
At midnight I'll take up a brush, repaint the station roof white.

Carol Alexander
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Carol Alexander's poetry appears in various anthologies including the ekphrastic 2017 Resurrection of a Sunflower (Pski's Porch Publishing),Broken Circles (Cave Moon Press), Through a Distant Lens (Write Wing Publishing) and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 1.Her work can be found in numerous print and online journals such as Bluestem, Caesura, Canary, Chiron Review, The Common, Matter, Poetrybay, San Pedro River Review, Split Rock Review, The New Verse News, Soundings East and forthcoming in The High Window, Southern Humanities Review, J Journal and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook BRIDAL VEIL FALLS (Flutter Press). HABITAT LOST, Alexander's first full-length collection of poems, is available from Cave Moon Press and Amazon (2017).