and from the inside in

Vereshchagin’s “Doors”
All entrances forbid. But I linger
before the enormous
gold arabesques of painted doors
in The Doors of the Mosque—
as if by following the lines
to their end, I might enter
what I couldn’t understand.
Ten years since I first stood
dizzied by its beggars—one
cross-legged, hands working
over something not visible, face
turned away. Half in terror
they might return his gaze,
Vereshchagin must have hurried
back to sketch them still
blazing the edges of his sight.
A world so far from where he came,
that, upon arrival, he was
someone else. How he fled, could not
but return in his mind again
to the country he was born to paint
and throw himself against,
his brush retouching the hands that lifted
as he passed them daily, brushing
his sides, as if he were a canvas.
It’s not my place, he’d want
to say. Or I can’t understand. The gold
minaret ablaze, the beggar
soured in filth, his hand a child’s mouth.
Judging eye. Window
without frame. Why do I turn my face again
to what looks away?
Years ago, in winter, so sick
it hurt to inhale, in the shell
of what I did not know
I was, I stumbled on a station—
its five tracks stretching
past the horizon, took the thumb
to St. Petersburg, tilted
with the crowd past a legless vet,
his palm open as if holding up
the globe. I went inside,
saw the doors and they did not
open. I stood at the doors
and they did not open—and I could rest,
at last, before them.
Philip Metres
66