Golconda

My husband has died, and I can’t remember the title of the Magritte
with floating men in black bowlers and trenches,
arranged in the sky like ornaments, their faces vacant, casual,
as if they are standing in line to buy stamps,

each floating man slipping into those crevices of my heart
that can still laugh at pain, rest in the absurd, play in the mundane.
They look like him, but more like the men
who are still alive, and dot the church pews behind me.

Thirteen years before they floated, the Nazis invaded Belgium.
Magritte survived by turning his Dada Communist Surrealism
into a docile, sunlit Renoirism. Oversized flower bouquets
and faceless men passing on the street: soft, dream-like strokes.

Perhaps the war felt like that, blurry and detached, like when I arrive
someplace but don’t remember how I got there, or when I see
the sheets are bloody before seeing the body, and I realize
every new treatment was a new way of lying to myself.

Magritte hid in dreams to elude the asylum, or worse,
and awoke to a world weary with truth.
Surrealists wanted to show man his own absurdity,
but after the Holocaust, what was left to show?

The church is silent, though someone is singing.
My feet float above the black floor, I fly up,
bump into the golden dome,
find a window and slip out, so high that when I look down

it’s all dreamy brush strokes:
white flowers on a black coffin,
a yellow sketch of a hand on my shoulder.