Night Sky #6

after Vija Celmins

If it were good to be easily deceived, the way
it is good to cry at sad movies, or to know,

intuitively, the right way to hold
an infant, maybe more people

would like me. If you told me that painting
was a photograph, I would believe you. If

you said it was an accident, a freak spray
of paint, I would believe that, too––

most artists are trying to trick you, but I’m
not. I’m just watching the streetlamps

blink on, feeling like I’ve witnessed
a secret proceeding, some phenomenon

I wasn’t supposed to see. Like when his legs
were too broken to stand, so he’d piss

in a plastic container, or the childlike way
his mouth would tremble, when he said

a life without me was no life
he felt he could live––never mind

that when he jumped, he knew
that I loved him. Never mind

he’d grown strong enough
to pin me to the bed. Each threat

became gospel, each scar
hard currency, each star an eye

staring through me. I can behave,
with increasing consistency, as if

none of it ever happened––
did he say no one would love me

as he did, or that no one
would ever love me? There is

a blankness and resistance filling in
what must be the world’s emptiest

ballfield. There are dog
or maybe coyote tracks

in the red silt. If I came here
with a son, if the son

were mine, there is no world
in which I wouldn’t be afraid of him.

Clare Flanagan is a Brooklyn-based poet and editor. Raised in Minnesota, she is a recent Wiley Birkhofer fellow at NYU, where she is currently working to complete her MFA thesis. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Poetry Online, Grist, and OSU's The Journal, among others.