Eleanor Berry

‌                 Word and Thing

                            ‌–Wind II, oil on masonite, by Jim Shull

The painting, a coastal landscape, is titled
‌         “Wind,” but the word I think, gazing
‌               up at it on the living-room wall,
‌                is anvil—definite shape
‌                of the dune that thrusts
‌                clear across the view.
‌       I’ve never seen an anvil, save
‌       in a living museum, with staff
‌       in period dress—how is it then

that any instance of its distinctive shape
‌       calls up its name, as if a blacksmith
‌           hammered iron across the street?
‌               The thing long gone
‌               from daily life, the word
‌               has stayed and spread,
‌       attaching to whatever shares
‌       the shape of a flattened tusk,
‌       from thunderclouds to a tiny bone

‌in the middle ear. But worrying the word,
‌         I get mere silhouette, this black text
‌              on a white page. I’ve left behind
‌               the painted scene—
‌               the scrubby shore pine,
‌               roots exposed, trunk
‌        warped horizontal by the seawind,
‌        bending its full length down across
‌        the wind-carved body of the dune.

‌I’ve lost the ocean mist that has coated
‌        all the bristling needles of the pine,
‌            the shadow clinging underneath
‌             the near dune’s jut,
‌             the lion’s-pelt yellow
‌             of sand without shade,
‌        failed to tell how the paint creates
‌        at once a flat design—still dance
‌        of hue and tone—and a world

‌        of dune and pine, palpably round.

 Eleanor Berry lives in rural western Oregon. She has two full-length poetry collections, Green November (Traprock Books, 2007) and No Constant Hues (Turnstone Books of Oregon, 2015). A former college teacher of English, she is a past president of the Oregon Poetry Association and of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.