Two Poems by Michael Grieve

Picture Framer

While the main dimensions can be taught,
it takes an artist of the marginal
to glean with more-or-less precision
(and nearly without measurement at all)
the edges of the field. You learn to trim
a workable excess and come to know
the space around things more than things themselves,
distinguishing which mount—the snow, or pearl?—
will keep a subject separate enough
to open up its window on the world.
You smooth the frame, you polish up the glass,
you write your name where nobody will see,
and with each iteration understand
less how things are held than are made free.

Statue of a Veiled Vestal

after Raffaelle Monti

Kneeling there, this girl forgoes
all earthly love, giving her focus

to the perpetual fire of Rome,
her offering of a mortal flame

preserved for perpetuity
not by the virgin deity

for whose protection she was chosen
but by a duke’s commission,

and when he reaches out to feel
the softly complicated veil

that half-obscures her face,
its gossamer is stark as ice.

She is beyond his reach, alone
and burning in a shroud of stone.

Michael Grieve was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. His pamphlet Luck was published by HappenStance and his first collection Asterism will be published by And Other Stories in 2027.