The Art Gallery
by Chad Campbell
Something brighter lives here
than the granite light
sparrowing in the arches—
a cathedralled order like a mind’s
envisioning of itself.
The air in the vaulted cobalt walls
hangs sterilely, as if
a gurney were always just
disappearing around the corners
of the sloped causeways
aqueduct to dust to blue to how
solid the silence of winter
sky lathes down the halls’
white mortar of stone.
For every open door
another forty are closed,
sealed panels starch
as archivist’s gloves
where you’re certain
The Bureau Against Imagination
is busy with tin tools scratching
illuminations of night
into vials to be locked away
in drawers. Imagination grows
oranges bright as these lights
entreating us to grow
or else fall into a place like this
cloister at the gallery’s end
where a gnarled tree wardens
a single gaunt plum.
It looks like the bronze spider
on the terrace crawled
sunk its fangs in the walls
torn as we are between
a painting of a sun in waves
and a drill-faced torso drilling
frantically at the blue dusted
dark until the moon slows
and the trees walk their seeds
through the broken windows.
Chad Campbell’s first collection of poetry Laws & Locks (Signal Editions 2015) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His poetry has appeared in Brick, The Walrus, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others, and a chapbook of recent work Euphonia was published earlier this year by Anstruther Press. Chad is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.