print previewback JOHN ALLMAN
Vernissage
What would I exhibit? I’ll do watercolors
of Ukraine, the misty Black Sea, five souls rising
from the Square, transparent horned grebes or bitterns,
death easy to portray rising, the sky ruddy
as the cheeks of freed prisoners. All of this hung
from gallery walls in Prague, with first-time portraits
of my mother and her five children, including
the first Alice, dead infant, her face beginning
to pale. But there are a few smiles, someone saying
“cheese,” and near the fire exit two untitled
studies of twilight on a lagoon, where redness
extinguishes blue, a blurry cormorant sitting
on top of a post, an impression of drying wings,
a fountain across the way spewing its whiteness
for the parched and bewildered. But why should
these pictures neighbor others of palmetto fronds?
A bent green and yellow so shy on canvases
of gray air, so timid in their natures, so tiredly here.
I nod a promise of a much later finissage
with chilled wine. The fiddling of Bach. Maybe
Debussy’s La Mer. 
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Vernissage