Still Life Anita Tanner

for William Butler Yeats

This still life Geraniums and a peach— I hardly see by looking, all life

reduced to inanimate since my husband’s death— the worst of it that he remains stilled.

Still, life. Those left behind know it, eternally stilled inside a frame.

Yeats frames a poem, Song Of a Wandering Aengus and cries he will pluck till time and time’s are done the silver apples of the moon,

the golden apples of the sun— life become words, brushstrokes or a bit of paint, motion and form stilled, artificially placed.

My own still life yearns with Yeats to spark flame, to hear a rustling on the floor and someone calling me by name.