Vermeer in Greenlandic Norse
We were stopped in the gallery’s cool
by the wash of light softening the woman’s brow,
the moonlike, nimbus-curating light
of Johannes’ woman, interrupted and welcoming,
a woman pleased to be interrupted:
neither of us had any idea, did we,
how our private talk, offered to the painting, was recording
on the cell-phone deep in your coat-pocket—
every gust of words, every spurt of laughter,
every surge of response, every interrogation;
every suggestion these two people liked to talk
while the tiny lens zoomed in on your pocket-seam…
Played back later it would come to sound
like a little shrill Cochimi, indecipherable Beothuk;
some unrehearsed Greenlandic Norse
in a world where such speaking-in-the-lining-of-the-pocket
is treated as the norm. Poor coddled signal.
It had to travel through winter wool and satin and museum air
to be recorded merely as a language
shrinking like the few who can still speak it:
the signal alone survives the voice.
