The Tryst
you’ll find
Only your Picture in my Mind.
—Andrew Marvell
by Mark Mansfield
Gaze at certain works of art awhile,
and something else emerges. You’ll see
from spikes of goldenrod appear embracing
lovers—her, demure and seemingly bored
with so much delicious solitude surrounding them;
him, smiling at how she plays the coquette so well.
Purists disparage this all-too-human need
of the mind’s eye not to mind, the guileless
intrusion of mise-en-scène when art chasing
art should suffice, a brush or pen scoring
sheer pageantries of line, color and form, mute hymns
by and for the eye, where once was little else
but a tabula rasa, awaiting these two upstarts
as light and shadow briefly merge, then part.
Mark Mansfield is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Strangers Like You, Soul Barker, and Greygolden, and one chapbook, Notes from the Isle of Exiled Imaginary Playmates (all published by Chester River Press). His poems have appeared in The Adirondack Review, Anthropocene, Bayou, Fourteen Hills, The High Window, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Iota, London Grip, Magma, Measure, Obsessed with Pipework, Peacock Journal, Salt Hill Journal, Sarasvati, Tulane Review, Visitant, and elsewhere. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee. He is a former musician and publications specialist. Currently, he lives in upstate New York.
