(For Alicia)

In Vermeer’s painting she turns
towards us, her head wrapped
in a blue and gold silk turban.
I know those eyes, the nose,

even the lips, parted with her
tongue light on the teeth,
the faint eyebrows, the shadow
and slope of the cheek, the chin.

Of course I’m amazed: what is
my daughter, now standing beside me,
doing in seventeenth century Holland?
von Zutphen, I presume?

She looks pensive, as if the
pearl, floating above her robe
and collar, was indeed the pearl
of wisdom, but I know that

she is thinking about the future
when she will be born in
Lindbergh’s town and how someday
she will dance on the moon.

She sees the centuries of pearl
the slow layering of generation
until this particular luster is
reached and stands now

in the museum, tilting her head
(first this way and then that)
to see what she’s become:
in Vermeer’s painting she turns.