Anne Wessel

Anne Wessel is a retired high school English Language Arts teacher. Her poems have appeared in The New Jersey English Journal, The Red Wheelbarrow 16, and Quartet Journal. Anne is the program manager for Watershed Literary Events, which features regular readings by emerging and published New Jersey writers in partnership with South Orange Village Cultural Affairs and the Meadowland Park Conservancy.

On Seeing Girl with the Pearl Earring

January 2014

Her last Sunday at the Frick, I slip

into the queue shivering down Fifth Avenue

behind a couple with a small boy.

The man pulls a wool cap from his pocket, stretches

it over the woman’s curls. The boy, breath cotton in the cold,

pulls at her coat. “Watch. Watch! Watch this, Mama!”

Inside, under dim light, the Dutch girl, head wrapped in watery-blue silk,

shoulders jacketed in green-gold, lips in blossom,

regards the crowd.

I am enchanted

by chalk and linseed, linen and lead.

The gallery hums: neither she nor I can speak.

I want to stay, avoid the unvarnished cold,

the ragged gray city, his cloudy glass at the sink.

Even now, I think of her with longing and grief.

Alternate Life

When his office shuts down, my son moves home, one morning

chides me, says stop worrying about the world,

says we’re likely living in an alternate universe anyway.

He is theorizing, but I barely recognize my face,

take pills to keep bones from breaking, often sleep alone.

I suddenly breath in a world absent

small sneakers at the door, raucous boy-voices in the yard, sorry can’t come, \so so busy, games

on Saturday, sheet-forts, my mother visiting unannounced, the deer

appearing in our wood with the sun and and all of us crying, “Hello deersies.”

Mornings, there’s still the deer and the wild pink light through the trees,

but he is bearded, too large to carry, too in love with another woman.

I’d sever a hand to kiss his unwhiskered cheek.