LatinosUSA

All month we float in a Matisse painting,
no matter a thousand miles from his easel,
on the balcony of our apartment in Sesimbra
 
watching the promenade of women
with linked elbows and kids jumping
on the wooden wall that tames the ocean’s reach.
 
A decade after our first visit, we sip
Portuguese wine, a bottle never more
than four Euros in the grocery, savoring
 
the depth of our pleasure. We eat bread
fresh from the padaria, a short walk
up steep cobblestone streets,
 
past azulejo tiled doorways,
their blue jewels shining
in seldom faded sun, and laundry hung
 
to dry scented by salt air, though we ourselves
opt for the laundromat where rusted machines
find no strokes of artist’s brush,
 
nor do the giant glass-boxed hotels
hacked into cliffs that once secluded
this fishing village from invaders.
 
The Angolan women who hawked
their hand-woven tablecloths
on the beach have vanished, replaced
 
by the bearded man asleep on the bench
below our window, a three-legged dog
never far from his side.
 
Still the painting retains
all its brightness, propped on a shelf
where colors never fade.

The featured image is The Open Window by Matisse

Copyright © 2024 Joanne Durham
All Rights Reserved

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). Recent awards include the 2023 Third Wednesday Magazine’s Annual Poetry Contest, the Mary Ruffin Poole Award, and 2022 and 2023 Pushcart nominations. Her poetry appears in Poetry South, Poetry East, Sky Island Journal and many other journals and anthologies. She lives on the coast of North Carolina, USA, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Visit her at https://www.joannedurham.com/.