My Wife Looks at Art

I find her by a watercolor
dazzled by the brightness of koi
the way a child is drawn to fire.

But this is nothing new.

Once she stood on my shoulders
to climb onto the porch roof
and reached toward the night sky
in a way Rousseau might have posed
a maiden under an endless
ribbon of rainbows.

When I joined her, we lay together
and counted the spaces between
clouds where moonlight fell,
our bodies like small boats unmoored
and adrift, lost in the looking.

Bio: Jeffrey Johannes is an artist and poet. He co-edited the 2012 Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar with his wife, Joan. He is currently combining his art and poetry to create comics, which he calls “pometoons,” using Walt Whitman’s pronunciation of “poem.” He lives in Port Edwards, Wisconsin.