Annunciation

This is your tender demand: look to me.
My eyes bore into the hairline cracks 
zigzagging the table. You lift my gaze up 
and across and out 

the room to an illumination I didn’t expect. 
I’d bought that painting so many years ago,
Mary draped in violet and sapphire opposite
the red urgency of Gabriel—they had rushed

my heart, so vibrant on some kind
of stretched translucent canvas, almost like skin,
almost like pain. Not quite an icon, with broken
planes and imperfections, electric angel striding

in the viewer’s space, intent on delivering the earth-
quake. Mary’s face ashen, brows drawn, gazing 
at not the angel, not the fractured fretwork of floor,
but at someone beyond, her still, slim fingers looped 

in forgotten crimson threads. From the room 
a room away I saw the scene as I’d never seen it, all 
those years: the first morning gleams kindling
silvered oils, quickening the luster of a bow 

plunging into the two fraught figures, 
the light dynamic, velvet with something almost
like peace. From this perspective, you say.
I won’t let you miss.

Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Butterfly Nebula (Backwaters, University of Nebraska Press), Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press), the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line), and the nonfiction book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock).

Art by Nathan Mulford