Travels in Vermeer by Michael White

“But I’ve come a long way.”
    â€œSorry,” she says, with a little smile. She opens a map and points at the standpoint for View of Delft .
    â€œYou can still go there,” she says. “But it looks nothing like it did then.”
    â€œI know. I was there.”
    She brightens. “If you want to see what it looked like in Vermeer’s day, go to the Oostpoort.” She traces a route with a slender thumb along the Oosteinde canal to, and through, the city’s last remaining gate. She also makes a little X on my map just past the Oostpoort, in the Oostplein, site of a great ice-cream shop. “Do you like ice cream?”
    I don’t say anything, but nod so emphatically she has to smile, the afternoon sun lighting her pale, freckled face—her luminous teeth—and says she often stops there when she goes to the Oostpoort.
    Walking out through the northeast quarter of town, I pass a kleuterschool (preschool), a library, a laundromat, a bike repair shop. Sophia will later point out, looking at a digital photo, that the Oostpoort looks like a small castle—with two very slender round brick towers on either side of the entrance, each pierced with arrow slits. In front of all this, there’s a lovely water gate with a drawbridge, for the Oostpoort secured the road as well as the canal. There were once eight similarly fortified gates in the royal city. A ragged remnant of wall, about two feet long, is still attached to either side of the Oostpoort.
    In the ice cream shop, I order “bosbessen,” because it’s the only word on the menu I believe I can pronounce. Surprisingly, the girl—with a slight smile—repeats it back with exactly the same pronunciation. It’s an exquisite flavor of bilberry, as it turns out, the best in Holland, for seventy euro-cents. By the time I wander back to the station on the other side of the city’s heart, the market is dismantled—all but the lingering odor of herring, the fumes of delivery trucks—and the cafés are filling up, the bikes all clattering home.
    7. A Poem
    I don’t know what I’d expected from Delft—to see the city in the painting or the painting in the city. But as I wandered the streets full of tourists and students, I imagined what I did not see: glazed tiles, Persian carpets, maps, blue leather chairs, the plaster wall. And I imagined Vermeer’s studio—what it must have meant, that paradise of hours. The artist’s dream, I think, is simply to vanish into his vision. Keats and his nightingale, Vermeer and his studio.
    Later, I’m left with doubt—as if I’ve struck a complete blank— but I’m also left with a Marble notebook filled with scribblings. One night, wondering what to make of my notes, I draft a poem called “View of Delft,” using some of the better images. At once I realize I’ll be writing more poems. This one ends:
    â€¦ No matter how
decisively the pointillés describe
    seams in the stone, the scene—no matter how
invitingly sun warms the unseen center—
    what I’m left with, looking back upon
this hour, this loveliness, remains a distance
    I can’t cross, a city I can’t enter.

A NNE
    [ November ]
    It’s Friday afternoon. I’m traipsing about a vast and sodden lawn—trying to keep my Rockports dry—looking for the entrance to a sprawling, former high school in the Piedmont. Now it’s a luxury condo redevelopment called “The Varsity.” I’m here to meet the owner/renovator of the place, a recently retired school principal close to my age. “The Varsity,” apparently, wasn’t the school where she had worked; she had inherited it when her father passed, and it had been closed for a number of years before she redeveloped it. All of this seems unnecessarily confusing.
    This is my first Match.com date. I’ve done it—the whole computer dating