Helen Engelhardt, poet, writer, storyteller and independent audio producer of Midsummer Sound Company, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her work
has appeared in national journals and international anthologies, her audiobooks nominated for "audies", her storytelling performance awarded the Hemingway Days prize. Poems featured here are part of a series inspired by Vermeer's paintings. "I chose Vermeer because his body of work is, with only four exceptions, focused entirely on the intimate, interior life of women. " Visit her at midsummersoundcompany.com.
The Music Lesson

At the other end of a long room
the lady and the cavalier alone at last
stand in silence, the virginal between them
He is captivated. His hand clasps the edge
of the instrument, declaring his intentions.
His unguarded face awaits her mercy.
She is her own pedestal. Her skirts,
a fluted column, neither resist nor comply.
Her back is to us, her face a blur
in the enigmatic mirror. We will never learn
her reply, nor look upon the face of the master
who shows us his easel reflected above
her head. Others reveal themselves
at work in miniature. He gives us the world
in the mirror, wherein we can lose ourselves.
Nothing intimate is uncovered here
but the nape of her neck, the back of the man
in the painting on the wall: a naked prisoner
who kneels before an unseen lady.
He is receiving Roman Charity. The lesson
is over. The music has not yet begun.
(Roman Charity or The Story of Cimon and Pero was the name of a genre painting favored at the time, depicting a naked man suckling the breast of a clothed lady standing before him. Pero suckled her imprisoned father who had been condemned to die by starvation.)
* Words written on the lid of the virginal, “Music, the companion of joy, the balm of sorrow”
Woman Holding a Balance
At
noon a beam of light decides Would that my judge, serene
to
witness the judgment in this room as this woman burgeoning,
suspends
a balance in the air will find at the end
jewels poised upon her palms. both
my soul and my songs abiding.
View of Delft
Earth has nothing to
show fairer
than Delft adrift
between clouds
and their
reflections. A faience of russet
of gold along the
quays, canals
enameled green and
blue. All clues
are concealed in the
scrubbed cobbles. Tulip
fever once inflamed
this citadel
of sobriety, shook
Delft to its foundations.
The Thunderclap burst
the arch
of heaven, blew away
streets
with people, buried
Fabritius, his canvas
and the man sitting
for his portrait, under
the ruins of his home. Gliding under
the open mouthed
bridges, dark
waters mirror
windows. Did fire
ever devour
everything except
the pointed turrets
of the East Gate?
All seems so serene.
The most beautiful
light in the world peals
through a carillon of
leaves, across
the alleys, across
the River Schie
to a building
overlooking the port, to a window
on the second
floor. The natural light
of the mind. You can stand today where he stood,
overlooking the
natural-gas reservoir,
some new houses. The design remains
and so does the
water.
(Vermeer was a pupil of Carel Fabritius, who, when he died in
an explosion of gunpowder known as The Thunderclap in 1654, was
a young painter of great promise)
in homage to William
Wordsworth