Friday from the Archives: “In the Art Museum” a poem by James Applewhite in NCLR 2020
I normally pick archive pieces for impersonal reasons, but this week is my anniversary, and as the North Carolina Museum of Art is one of our favorite date spots, this poem spoke to me. ~Devra
Duke University Professor Emeritus James Applewhite has received numerous honors, including the North Carolina Award in Literature and inductions into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the author of thirteen poetry collections, four of which have received Roanoke-Chowan Awards. His poetry has been the inspiration for several years of annual art exhibits at City Art Gallery in Greenville, NC.
This poem is accompanied by artwork by New York native Peter Filene. He received his MA and
PhD from Harvard and has lived in Chapel Hill, NC, since 1967. He is Professor Emeritus at UNC Chapel Hill where he focused on the topic of twentieth-century American history with interests in gender, popular culture, and pedagogy. His award-winning art has been exhibited throughout the Southeast.
In the Art Museum
Pensive in the art museum,
she reprised her earlier beauty,
there among the distancing art-years.
Together, we had wonderingly-sadly
admired the glittering glass sculpture
“Portrait of a Marriage” – a stilled
crystalline waterfall wherein a bridal
shower descended in the gift-glass,
from its apex of perfect wine goblets,
onto the wider, lower shelves, where
stems and bells lay shattered alongside
fractured, transparent dinnerware –
as if emotional break-ups through
the years had been stilled, all
together, a stop-action emblem of
married fragility. We saw some truth
in this yet turned away, reassured
by the permanence of the bond we
felt, in all its enduring memories.
Warmly hand in hand, we walked
together.
Later, though, I lost
her in the last long hallway
distracted by the barbaric beauty
of Mayan ritual sculptures. When
finally I saw her, it was as if
she were already across distances of
years, waiting alone in her black travel
coat beside the door. A strange
premonition seized me as if I
were seeing her beyond a coming
separation – she perhaps traveling
to a far country, without me.
Now in these days after her death
I want so much to run after her
and hold her there, we never to be apart.
Grab a 2020 issue today!
