Maine Room
Jeff Thomson
—Andrew Wyeth, Watercolor and Graphite on Paper
It’s the late light that gouges
at the heart, really. November’s end
and the leaves down. Birch trunks
and the calligraphy of shade.
Cold light, clean light. In a square
of it wooden plovers on the mantle
preen in a room so Spartan
it could be being punished for
something, the way the woods
in winter are punished with snow,
the way the wind channels down
through the gaps in the mountains
and finds the hearth of the sea
cold and dark in some room
abandoned somewhere and empty.