Many Changes of the World / Joshua Alan Sturgill
I dream I stand behind the Moon
as she paints a still-life:
twenty-nine grapes in a silver bowl
on an oakleaf-patterned tablecloth
by an open window.
For their skin, she compounds a purple almost black;
an inscrutable green for their stems’ tangled lightning;
touches of Tuscan pink
on the textured edge of the bowl
to suggest light through morning fog.
She moves quickly, decisively,
with an economy born of long familiarity with her medium.
Not turning from her work, she tells me
Impression opposes abstraction.
Hence, the first is the truest glance.
Only a hand fully awake
can capture sight
without interference from the mind.
The Moon steps back from a finished canvas
still glistening with poppy oil — an illusion
of moving air surrounds the image
as if the bowl has just been set down and settles into the cloth,
as if the dim light reaches eagerly for noon.
I think she saw these grapes in Noah’s vineyard
but I am ashamed to say it aloud
and I wonder if Eden was swept away by the Flood
or was it some other kind of place
and still grows and lives and waits?
and I wonder how many changes of the world the Moon has seen.
I dream her fingertips are stained
titanium white
lemon ochre
phthalo blue
All poetry and supplementary material: copyright 2025 by Joshua Alan Sturgill. All rights reserved.
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