What Vermeer’s The Milkmaid Silences Inside Strength, by Elly Katz

The Milkmaid, by Johannes Vermeer (Netherlands) 1657-58

What Vermeer’s The Milkmaid Silences Inside Strength
 
A narrow channel of milk flows from the earthenware jug.
You are sturdy, calloused hands metering splashes
I almost hear through the centuries.
 
You web your hung head in contemplation or domesticity
the gap your posture doesn’t give away.
Texture lifts off bread on the table, a crumbling bounty suggests your endurance,
labor across hours, maybe even longer.
But perhaps, like me, you don’t believe in time.
 
The bottoms of my feet ache as I press my eyes into your stance.
You refuse to let me meet your hooded gaze.
I hunger to know what palette Vermeer redacted from your irises.
 
If only your mouth fell open to cut words into who you are,
where your thoughts spend seconds.
 
Sunlight searches through the window, her curious arms enshrine the yellow frock chafing your elbows, your ultramarine apron.
 
You secret expression
a portrait of organic tones whose range speculates about your being beyond duty, telling me in speechless that you are a plurality of you,
that the material girding you doesn’t reflect you in earnest.
 
You wear contrast, as you succumb and strain to
break free of brushstrokes stalling you.
 
Nails and their residues bite into the white wall at your back,
where a foot-warmer is patient, a cat awaiting attention.
What did that wall say in its life before chores took you into their custody?
 
What is your religion, the earthly delights that sing you alive,
all your names other than “The Milkmaid?”

Elly Katz

At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went to a doctor for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Upon waking from anesthesia, she searched in vain for the right half of her body. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. Her path towards science, amongst other ambitions, came to a halt. As a devout writer, she feared that poetry, too, fell outside what was possible given her inert right fingers. However, in the wake of tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor.

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