Ghost of a Still Life by Doug Tanoury

Ghost of a Still Life

We live in a house where everything is white

like a still life by Giorgio Morandi.

The roof line is snow on a mountain

that rises from a far horizon,

and each wall, the bleached-bone bark

of sycamores on an August afternoon.

We move within the high-domed chambers of a cloud,

where vaulted ceilings flow like fabric

and hang over us like the crisp lily-bright linen

draped across an altar at Easter morning Mass,

the alabaster that is a tropical twilight,

china and porcelain that is sunrise,

And when we speak to each other

our words are pressed

between the pages of this place

like the printed lines in a book of poems

preserved forever in time

and suspended frozen in whiteness.