Appearance
“A Family Group” by John Koch
A shaft of mirrored light steps through the glass
And sweeps the surface of the oils. They show
A family in a cadenced pose. This chasse
The slippered beam here calmly makes is slow,
Perhaps caressing even. On the pearls
The woman wears, the beam brings out the light
The painter put there in those softened swirls
Of shine long decades since, an ivory sleight
Of whiteness that of course was always meant
To be a fiction of the beauty of the spheres,
A fiction of the light the moment that he bent
To brush them in, more lovely than the tears
She wept when first her husband gave them to
Her on their wedding night when love was new.