1.

Imagine a room. The room contains a number of regular elements.
There is a window on the left. There is the light it admits. A pearl necklace
and a yellow satin coat with an ermine collar. Invariably there is a table 
to display the elements: look, a loaf of bread; look, a basket. 
These are the organs. 

Adorning the back of the room is a painting or a map. At least, a nail.
Then the canvas is gone for a moment, standing behind the observer. 
Painting, window, mirror and map form the boundaries
a second skin to live in. A miraculous membrane breathing
between inside and out.

Only the visitors change. They move the organs now and then
stand motionless in their closed systems of paint and sable hairs 
open the window, play lute or guitar, read letters, pour milk 
or stand in the Dutch room, all warm gravidity. 
Like this lady.

With her belly before her like a glowing sickle 
she seems to weigh air. She is expectant. But of what? 
The woman is not weighing, she is waiting. Like some kind of Mary
wrapped in the night’s pouch of blue and white. Unapproachable
heart with two dishes.

People see her for much that she is not. They used to say,
“Vanitas. The woman is pondering eternal life.” They called her
Woman Weighing Gold. Or Pearls. Her belly a crowded room full.
It was the gleam that misled us like aureoles, for centuries.
Because the dishes are empty.

And those who seek references, want deep-sea insights or cherish
higher values should do just that, but this is enough. 
For me this is sufficient, like a pagan faith in the tangible. 
The sublime resides in this room. A crust is a window is a table. 
Vermeer was the great equaliser.

When the painter died, he left the organs intact: 
the glass, the paintings, the map and also the yellow coat 
that had been worn by one woman and then another 
they were still there in the room, which seemed no emptier than usual. 
Only the master was gone.

Not a sketch or drawing of him remained, today we know
virtually nothing, no diary excerpts or chance letters 
except the letters on his paintings, that have since been spread
over The Hague, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, New York and Washington. 
The room has multiplied.

2.

There is another room as well. This room is scarcely lit. 
Nothing on the table. It is quiet and deserted. The window
is round and tiny. A peephole through which the world 
looked in, casting a sky-blue colour on the wall.
This was the boardroom. 

From here loans were handed out for years like so many pearls.
Passing the readies to anyone able to mist a mirror or sign
on the line unaided while meanwhile they tried to keep the pearl 
or at least withhold the gleam so they could flog it again later 
on a separate occasion,

by transferring it to a new room, where they could chisel
the weight away from the gleam to deliberately lay it on
someone else’s table as their holy credit rating, over and over
on someone else’s hopeful table – risk has to move, move away, fast
out of this room, further still 

from room to room, until in the last pitch-black corner
the shadow of the weight of the gleam of the former pearl was also 
removed, and the caboodle repacked so many times the walls began
to slide and tunnels formed of their own accord like bundles of nerves 
in a system with no exit.

                 And the system
                 saw that it was good

                                  neither head nor tail 
                                  uncentred excessive

                                                    it was lighter than ether
                                                    better than perfect.