She wears a yellow
sun dress and white apron
as she catalogues spring in Solomon’s
speckled field.
A straw bonnet shades her cheek, surely
not for modesty,
and she carries a basket of white
evangelical daisies
praising heaven though their wings have
been clipped for now.
Who would question this golden-haired
mistress of the morn?
Unexpectedly, she turns and steps from the
painting
onto the gallery floor—no one perceives
the three-dimensional sin—
and threads the stem of a lazy lilting daffodil
through a buttonhole over the quickening of
my heart.
She kisses me with lips as red and ripe as
strawberries
before walking to the museum door and the
street beyond.
On the canvas, a brunette invites me to a picnic on the grass.
I accept, for who am I to resist the call of
lascivious love.
How long I have tasted the vintage of come
hither
from the wineskin of this country-bred
lass—
a day, a year, or a century’s slow waltz—
is not a matter of importance to patrons
and guests.
No matter, for she has blue poppy eyes
above peony cheeks
and, under her rough cotton dress, wild
roses for breasts.
~William Hammett
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