Our Past is the Emptied Café Terrace, by Peter Kelly

Cafe Terrace at Night, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1888

Our Past is the Emptied Café Terrace
 
Our past is the emptied café terrace:
Mid-September, Arles 1888. 
The North-eastern corner of the Place du Forum. 
Now there is a painting of night, without night.
 
Through constellations captured in time,
On a sky’s trodden contours,
Her gaze scans across the scene
For figures calling last-orders.
 
Glass darkening the internal vibrancy,
Its print overtook our Oregon home,
Bracing floral-fringed lampshades
–assured traces of Art Noveau.
 
Its being in time shading our own:
October tail-end of an Indian-summer
Remembering an unplaced bar
On a Prague street corner,
 
Awaiting the last bus to come
–to deliver us back 
To the familiar hedged shadows 
Of an emptying campsite.
 
Another, smaller, terraced-print hangs
Out of place in the elsewhere of now.
A poorly-framed charity shop relic, 
Past belonging to the unhoused.
 
You watch it float above the roof, 
And vacant rooms of your dollhouse,  
Wherein a world might be revealed 
By the removal of an external wall. 

Peter Kelly 

Peter Kelly teaches and researches poetry in the ancient and modern worlds in Princeton University. He is originally from Galway, Ireland and much of his work considers ideas of place and displacement in shifting environments. He is the editor of a collected volume on Ekphrasis, which brings together creative and academic essays on the connections between the use of ekphrasis in ancient Greece and Rome, and contemporary poetry.