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Charles Borkhuis Observation and Poetics in “Three Windows, Two Chairs” (by Burt Kimmelman)* Silence empties us out as we gaze across the room and landscape of the painting “Three Windows, Two Chairs,” leaving us with the sensual breath of observation that lingers gently within the poem. One wants to dwell with Kimmelman in this painting and imagine “ships buoyant upon // undulations of waves / as they approached the shore.” The paint bleeds through the mind’s dreamy extension of what is there in the painting and what is not, namely, the ships and waves that undulate in the poet’s mind as well as ours when we read his words: to “wonder what might be seen / at the land’s conclusion— / though there can never be / an end [. . .].” Our imaginations close in on the seeming paradox of “an end” and “there can never be // an end ….” Kimmelman knows well the paradox of which he speaks; the viewer’s mind enters the painting and “fills in” an end, in dreaming dance between presence and absence. This imaginative “filling in” of the missing details between things is, in itself, an intuitive poetic response to the empty spaces in our lives; it is an element of surprise, the free associative leap of possibility that marks the mystery of art. *As the poem appeared in Posit 35 (Jan. 2024): select here |