By Susan Cohen

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

       after Brueghel the Elder and W.H. Auden

We know what the father did,
aimed too high.

And the son dared too much,
while the ploughman and his stout horse
just got on with business.

But what about the ocean,
Brueghel’s dull green sea, spread
flat as a bolt of fabric?

A few spits of foam
around the boy who cannonballed
headfirst, legs askew,
poor zapped mosquito. A shrug
of polite ripples
and the water takes him in
without the protest of a splash—
Brueghel’s brush applied like a narcotic
to smooth the waves.

They did get it wrong
sometimes, the masters.
Even a painted ocean
can only take so much.

We know now what our ambition
does to seascapes—empties them
of coral and of coho,
fills them with glacial melt
and sends the waters raging.

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Susan Cohen is the author of Democracy of Fire (2022), her third full-length collection. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Alaska Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Verse Daily, and won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, Terrain Annual Poetry Prize, and a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prizes. She lives in California.

http://www.susancohen-writer.com

Stephen Reichert (American, b. 1975), Baltimore City, Maryland, is a multidisciplinary artist with recent solo shows at Hancock Solar Gallery, Co_Lab, Baltimore City Hall, and Sotheby’s Roland Park Gallery; a current show at The Fox Building; and group shows at Ellington-White Contemporary, The Peale Museum, American Visionary Art Museum, Arts Fort Worth, University of Maryland, National Art League, Cerulean Arts Gallery, Abington Art Center, Sebastopol Center for the Arts and many others. He is the editor of the poetry magazine Smartish Pace. Reichert is represented by K. Hamill Fine Art & Design.