Not What It Seems (yay!)

In the photograph, the tray hovers in space,
dark all around the metal platform
holding glasses, a small vase of flowers
and morning paper.
There is elegance in it and you imagine
a certain 19th-century elegance,
breakfast on the veranda, Juice about to be
poured, a smoothing of the handlebar mustache,
as children, louder than allowed, play in the lawn.
With their nanny of course.

It is an illusion, however.
The photograph was taken in the steamship
kitchen, in the bowels of the boat,
carefully staged, a servant’s hovel,
a place of preparation for what the servant
will never experience. And for some reason,
in the photograph, all is dark as slavery.
An illusion of elegance while telling a different story
than was intended

Still, it makes you smile,
your imagination at times stronger
than the world you actually live in.
seeing what is there, but interpreting it differently
than the world around you, creating elegance and love
and promise and dancing in the midst of the opium den,
lost in Coleridge and cummings and dreamscapes
that live only in your head, and at times,
when the wind is just right, in the heads of those you love,

About this poem

Inspired by a comment from a reader (Hi Susan!) that included Mick Jagger singing “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction). That line, however, never made the cut.

A poem in the style of my editor, who writes far more interesting poetry than me.

Poetry is weird stuff.

The photograph was taken at the Shelburne Museum, in the restored steamship that lives there.

Tom