Sally Keith   STUDY IN INCREMENT One conversation is contained in the room. There are two but only one chair to comfortably sit in. Light falls. * Add that one is in love with the other. It might have been you. The light outside falling slovenly on and through the shape of the sycamore leaf, * Siphoned, somewhat deflected where the vascular connectives knot, but soft, is so. It is dusk. Pinks and red. * If somewhere Achilles is soaking in the still hot Mediterranean sun, elsewhere I study the pieces of a painting. One woman is standing. * The woman standing beside the well glances inward at a sylvan conversation. There is a shepherd. There is a man with red bouffant sleeves and a cap. * This painting is Bellini’s. It hangs in the National Gallery four miles away from the room where I write. Mine was the conversation. * To understand the quality of resistance tightening, take Agamemnon annoyed. Achilles is soaking. He dangles his hand down from the hammock, hot sun, into the hair of the other. * Counter to natural inclination, the collage-artist, my friend, has cut the canvas in half Reattached it leaving a gap, which makes the scene more real. For dusk, a coopery auburn color. * The red hints show real anger. If you lift the ancient Athenian vase and stare In gold, encircled there: two figures and around the outside a procession. * To step from the path of a person approaching is so different from dodging a thing. The body in time, a body absorbing. Outside the slatted walnut-tree leaves are discernable against the sky, * Whereas on the grass they fall without precision. There is a shepherd with bare feet. There is a man with an embroidered shirt who carries a flute. * The two are conversing. The one with the flute looks in at the conversation, Whereas, the one pouring water looks into the well, bored and unrelenting. * Think of Achilles. Achilles does not want to bury his friend because he loves him. In the room, that one will wrong the other is the inevitable situation. * But Achilles will not bury Patroclus’ body until the ghost arrives and commands him. I understand. He wants another moment to touch him. * Instantaneousness though is the proof of nothing. The one pouring water looks bored by the others. According to X-radiography, once she had not been. * Inside the room there is a pattern. Longer then shorter gaps punctuate the increasingly lively post-concert conversation. It was my friend who explained to me the vase as she saw it in a museum. * Achilles uses both of his hands to tend to his friend’s wounded arm. The tendon in Patroclus’ outstretched foot parallel to the backs of the men Is the force holding the image inside the frame. * They want to stay. The pupils of their eyes are very wide, admissive of pain, but so pleased there, Perfect in that, the stillness there is before the epic moves again.   Ruth Bolduan Galatea crylic on canvas 72 x 100" see more work by Ruth Bolduan THE CAROUSEL Only once have I driven home through a fire, but twice have I sat by the carousel in Avignon dumbly amused by the children, wanting or not the pleasure of turning, not a one unable to decide. It is true, extinct are the moa and elephant birds but still representing the ratites, the emu, kiwi, rhea and ostrich, large birds with oversize breastbones that once were graced with flight but are no more. Named after the Swiss geologist, Agissiz, and covering over the heart of the then continent America, giant glacier, glacier which according to the scientists melted within the span of a year, bringing with it manifold great myths of the flood. Man arrives, final mountains rise. Inland migration brings the usefulness of caves, arrow- heads and with the urn the idea of wanting. It strikes me places most often thought of and most loved to whence return can almost lack meaning, there is a kind of being that is an erasure. From the story of Noah and the dove, etcetera, comes the idea horizon, the green branch the wavering. Do you remember the lemon drink that afternoon as tasting bitter, or not? That there was no fire that time, that there is none, but time, concerns me as I fear we are burning as the children turning wave goodbye.     MOLYBDENUM —where lavender comes from, also aluminum, as in caught on the roofline the ladder that is leaning and there allowing that the sky appear bitten. It is a by-product of copper. Where a quarry is in front of long blank cliff walls, a panoply of crane extensions propped on cement blocks if you want to purchase one. The photographs I found Sunday— thick turquoise pools of uneven color cordoned off in sections: navy, cyan, azurite, and cerulean. Molybdenum blue is complex, an oxide dye. Sometimes I find these arguments to which I can't connect. Dark lines trail off without intention. Most banal the fact of unconcern inside the sun. Molybdenum adds toughness in steel and tungsten. Throughout the town arboretum blue oat grass and wild moonbeam runs. The mining holes abandoned now and between them the landscape on. Crushed and milled pounds of ore will go for just one pound of dust. Rock blown are the hillsides. What glows inside the photographs— silver, brittle— comes from the dust and multiplies in random streaks, chemicals or as a stream splits open the earth’s interior darkness. It seems strange this wanting to be convinced when already we lean toward the things we find most dangerous.   PROVIDENCE The restaurant owner opened the doors To let in the smell from the sea Which stuck on the breeze. On the table, A white linen, a low candle, a tiger lily bouquet. The specials chalked in cursive we read From a slate, while the waiter, starched shirt And folded apron, explained them and we ordered, At first, a carafe of a thinner than usual white colored wine. My mother sat across from me. She did not lean her elbow on the table, nor slide The weight of her up the arm to make a leading shoulder. The light in her eyes was first a pool, then a line. Outside the skiffs in exit sailed toward us. On the corner a crushed diet coke can. What she said changed me. Salt was exploding all over the sea.     Sally Keith is the author of three books of poetry: The Fact of the Matter (Milkweed Editions, 2011), Dwelling Song (University of Georgia Press, 2004), and Design, winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has published poems in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, A Public Space, Black Clock and Literary Imagination. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Ucross Foundation, she is a member of the MFA Faculty at George Mason University and lives in Washington DC.   Published in Volume 12, Number 4, Fall 2011.