John Everett Millais' Ophelia, by Markham Johnson

Ophelia, by John Everett Millais (UK) 1851.

John Everett Millais' Ophelia
 
Wind stirring branches beats the windows, as a storm 
pours over the gutters that have given
 
up like Hamlet who could not even save 
his love from drowning.  Asters
 
wave their red wands in the current, Nile
lilies gasp, going under.  I dream
 
of Lizzie Siddal in a two story walk-up where 
John Everett Millais has dressed her in a pool
 
with deep cut banks, her auburn hair pulled
free. A little thunder, a zipper of lightning
 
scoring the post oak in the front yard carries me
to a London afternoon when I stopped to visit 
 
Lizzie at the Tate while my friends wandered
off to sketch friezes and nudes.  After
 
forty years, what have I forgotten of Millais’ 
Ophelia: phlox, delphinium, a blue 
 
stream that just fit her body, water lilies bearing 
her lightly in their arms?  Once, 
 
in another electric storm, lightning cracked
behind the second story farmhouse window where 
 
my wife’s hair rose in the surge and all
the lights blew.  In the stillness we could hear the guzzle 
 
of bright cold water pouring off 
the roof as the wind dredged deep channels 

through galleries of corn, leaves bent and turning
palms up in the current, while lancets
 
of rain furrowed the field.  I slipped into 
a dream of floating in the moonlight miracle
 
of earth turned to water.  Even here in Oklahoma one 
life might be exchanged for another.

Markham Johnson

Markham Johnson won the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod, and his first poetry collection was published by the University Press of Florida.  He has an MFA from Vermont College, and his poems have been published widely in magazines including Nine Mile, Coal Hill, and Library Journal.