print previewback WILLIAM LOGAN
En Plein Air
Watercolor in grisaille—intemperate,
fugitive tints the eyes invent—
those hours pass in array, a funeral march,
the procession of the happy-to-be-alive.
In retrospect, furrowed spring
and the rough pillars of late summer
stretched across the skin of December,
sheet-snows wandering the trackless past.
Things unsaid too often said.
The street’s old houses took the shock
of their century to the next. How long
before the brick unsaid itself?
That muttering of swifts outstayed
their unwritten lease; the hair-thin glass
one morning cracked the disputed border
of electric current buried in the walls.
The old world lay in house arrest.
The shadow came, left, came again. 
Daumier, Man on a Rope
En Plein Air