"Volcano Tile, Davis Square," by Jane Zwart

[dominika-kretek.livejournal.com]

I was coming out of the subway, minding my own business, reading the Threepenny Review, when I suddenly realized that the subject of the poem I was reading was right in front of me...

Volcano Tile, Davis Square

John Spindler, I read your name each day;
its letters are serif ruts in a tile you made in grade school.

When I see your surname, Spindler, I cannot help imagining you
the unmentioned fourth; the one unable to unseat
Butcher, Baker, or Candlestick Maker. The tile you made in grade school
is grouted flush to brick, with perhaps a hundred others,
in the hallway of a train station; it is the last one before the escalator
I take to rise to the street.

Spindler, the volcano on your tile is exquisite.
Other kids applied their glaze like
coloring in the countries on a map—
there are a dozen flowered tiles nearer the trains,
where a vendor in a safety vest sells tokens.
Each bloom fans its uniform petals in unmixed glaze,
whether roses in a vase that crowds the ceramic square
or zinnias, growing from the flat horizon of the tile's bottom edge.
Near the Holland Street exit,
a slick of ice is nothing but mint-blue; even the skater's scarf
can be depended upon to keep segregate
the colors in its thin stripes.
Six monochromatic sunsets and shuttered houses later,
after a mountain whose ice-cap is as neatly drawn as a stuttered "w,"
John Spindler's volcano.

From its peak, the accidental gentleness you used as a boy
approximates the volcano's stream, its thrown molten stone.
At the apex of your tableau, Spindler,
Vesuvius melts the colored glazed streamers you painted at its peak;
pumpkin and crimson average. Lavender cedes to umber.

Violent and tender, the erupted mountain:
Spindler, each day I suspect every artisan on the train
of having forged it, your volcano.

—Jane Zwart