… and we shall go to have coffee in Delft,
early in the morning, when the sky has
clear colours from Master Vermeer’s canvas
and his women make noise with buckets
and open dusty stained-glass windows

We shall drink coffee with a view to a harbor,
and slightly tremble putting away fragile china
with blue birds more than three hundreds years old.

The shadows will dissolve from
tenement houses and only cats will be
basking in the sun on the flagstones,
peeping from time to time at the place
where there is nothing except the transient
sparkle of the sun, as if reflected
in the pearl Earring …

17 January 2006

Johannes Vermeer “View on Delft” (1660-1661)