It's Always Something, by Tina Schumann

The Nativity, by Piero della Francesca (Italy) 1470-1475

​It’s Always Something 

​The aspen doing something in the wind – Robert Hass 
 
In the dream  
              I wander deep halls  
                          in the Museum of Lost Meaning. 
The saints were busy conferring about something  
                          in the della Francesca.  
                A resurrection of cranes  
stood aloof and rigid, a black-eyed junco half-way off the frame. 
                (Even the magpie seems to have been struck dumb.)
While an approximation of angels held the silent O of their lips 
                 and looked toward heaven – the notion of God doing something  
                                            to their souls. 
Is there a word for all the unsayable confines of the world?  
              Something beyond conformity, just this side of dismissal? 
As the undercurrent of years  
                           does something 
                                          to your life. All those hours  
                           spent comparing 
one beauty to another, whether on the canvas or beyond the gallery doors – 
             the moon doing something in the sky.

Tina Schumann

Tina Schumann is a Pushcart nominated poet and the author of three poetry collections, Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press, 2019) which was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Four Way Books Intro Prize and the Julie Suk Award; Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode Editions, 2017) which won the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition and As If (Parlor City Press, 2010) which was awarded the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She is editor of the IPPY-award winning anthology Two Countries. U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen, 2017). Schumann’s work received the 2009 American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal, finalist status in the Terrain.org annual poetry contest, as well as honourable mentions in The Atlantic, Crab Creek Review and The Allen Ginsberg Award. She is the poetry editor for Wandering Aengus Press and her poems have appeared widely since 1999, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Parabola, Palabra, Poetry Daily, Poemeleon, Rattle, Verse Daily, and read on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. www.tinaschumann.com