Vermeer in Boston, by Denise O'Hagan

A Lady Writing, by Johannes Vermeer (Netherlands) 1665

Vermeer in Boston
 
I’d waited decades
To see that knowing glance, forever paused
That letter being permanently written
And that ermine-edged yellow morning jacket.
 
Yet I found myself, ridiculously,
In the exhibition by accident
Travelled half the world here
For another reason entirely
And stood, clammy palmed and weary
My thoughts haywire, clinging
To another imagined room a mere walk away
Where a team of specialists
Pored over our son
Whose opened chest
Was spread like a canvas
For the surgeons to splatter and daub
And create another version
Of his deformed and failing heart:
Their masterpiece.
 
And while all this was happening
I met her painted gaze, unflinching,
Wondering, even then, what she’d been writing
(and to whom, and why).
She’d raised her eyes, unblinking
Poised and faintly mocking
Too intelligent, I couldn’t help thinking,
For twenty-first century positivity.
Instead, her Mona Lisa almost-smile
Stayed with me almost all the while
I waited for the phone call
I didn’t feel alone.
 
And when they’d finished
Eleven long hours later
Applied the appropriate solutions
Brushed away the bloody residue
Hung up their paintbrushes,
It came:
"Your son is in recovery."
 
Still later, on the long flight home,
Juggling pills and international time differences
Her enigmatic expression flew with me
Long after the shadows around her faded
With her writing box and ink-wells,
Her slim stilled quill pen,
The satin ribbons shining in her hair
And the round of her wrist bone
All this slipped away –
Until I saw it later
In a catalogue.
 
And in one moment
I was back in Boston with her,
Waiting.
 
Denise O'Hagan

Author's note: Written after waiting for our son’s open-heart surgery in Boston Children’s Hospital, November 2015. Coincidentally, the nearby Museum of Arts was holding an exhibition on the painters of the Dutch Republic, which included Vermeer’s A Lady Writing.
 
This poem was shortlisted in the Booranga Literary Prizes 2019. It was published in fourWthirty, anthology of selected entries (Booranga Writers’ Centre, November 2019).

Denise O’Hagan is an editor by trade. Born in Italy, she lived in the UK before emigrating to Australia. With a background in commercial book publishing, she set up her own imprint, Black Quill Press, in 2015. She is Poetry Editor for Australia and New Zealand for The Blue Nib and her poetry is published widely, including in New Reader Magazine, Other Terrain Journal and Scarlet Leaf Review. She won First Prize in the Adelaide Plains Poetry Competition (2019), was highly commended in the Australian Catholic University Poetry Prize (2018) and the Scribes Writers Literary Award (2019), and short-listed in the Robert Graves Poetry Prize (2018). Website: https://denise-ohagan.com/