They were in the scullery talking.
The meadow had to be sold to pay their riotous expenses;
then the woods by the river,
with its tangled banks and snags elbowing out of the water,
had to go; and then the summer house where they talked—
all that was left of an estate once so big
a man riding fast on a fast horse
couldn’t cross it in a day. Genevieve. Hortense. Meme.
The family’s last born, whose pale name is inscribed on the rolls
of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. As in the fresco of the Virgin,
where the copper in the pigment oxidizes to trace a thin green cicatrix
along a seam of Her red tunic,
a suspicion of one another furrowed their
consanguine, averted faces.
Why go anywhere at all when it rains like this,
when the trees are sloppy and hooded
and the foot sinks to the ankle in the muddy lane?
I didn’t stay for the end of the conversation.
I was wanted in Paris. Paris, astounded by my splendor
and charmed by my excitable manner,
waited to open its arms to me.
—2010
Andrea del Sarto, Madonna del Sacco, 1525 (restored 2010)
Poet, essayist, and critic Vijay Seshadri was born in India in 1954 and came to the U.S. at the age of five. He worked as a commercial fisherman in Oregon for several years, and eventually earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia University. Seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom (1996), The Long Meadow (2003), and 3 Sections (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize. In his early days, his poetry began with an image, but later transitioned to beginning with a musical phrase. Of his nationality, Seshadri says, “I always say that whether I’m an American or not is something others might feel they have a right to decide, but I know I’m an American poet.” He has worked as an editor at the New Yorker and currently directs the graduate non-fiction writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in Brooklyn.
Food for Thought: Why does the poet choose the subtle yet exact image in lines 10-12? How does the syntax of the words “consanguine, averted” contribute to the poem’s depth?
Notebook in the Rain 