This is a "glose" (from Way Stations). (A Portuguese poetic form. Sylvia Petrie is a Rhode Island artist of Portuguese descent. Her husband Paul Petrie's book, Rooms of Grace : New and Selected Poems, just published, by New Orleans Poetry Journal Press.)

(I was mistaken about the provenance of the image. It was taken from the frontispiece of an old edition of Piers Plowman.)

 On an Untitled Print
    
                              for Sylvia Petrie

 
 The work is finished in the dark.
 The world's invisible, unknown.
 A night of snowfall leaves its mark.
 It will remain, when we are gone.

  
 Inside the silver picture frame
 frozen winter night has come.
 An image like a negative.
 Black ink feathered off, by hand,
 imprints a landscape (winter gloom).
 The traces of your handiwork
 are what gives light – the glowing land
 flows down (from hills to scattered sand)
 in random touches... flick and fleck.
 The work is finished in the dark.

  
 This labor scatters into day
 like Monday mornings – who can say
 what these wayward shapes contrive?
 Triangular, amid uncertainties,
 one tiny house (snowbound, lonely)
 gleams (nestled, shrunken)
 between the looming cedar trees
 and those unclear interstices
 which could be universe – or none.
 The world's invisible, unknown.

  
 The picture hangs against a wall
 where afternoon light sometimes falls,
 and sometimes (strangely) time will give
 instead of take... and I can see
 what you were doing, after all.
 Through curving space, look
 back... into reclusive memory.
 This house, this hill, this endless sea
 were yours.  Engravèd.  Cold and stark.
 A night of snowfall leaves its mark.

  
 We grow away from home forever.
 Epitaphs for each survivor
 elevate the long perspective.
 Parallels we harvested
 return.  As in a childhood fever
 everything we once disowned
 (what seemed frivolous, detested
 chaos) now coheres.  Nested
 on a hillside, sloping down...
 it will remain, when we are gone.

      
                              3.23.97