for ZK

I found you in a painting of a rickety cart
laden with turnips and the occasional potato

and I brought you home by subway
in my head, thinking somehow

I might free you of the penury
art has damned you to—

to sit together and sip slivovitz
at my kitchen table, lit by a vase of lizyanthus.

The bare patches and tears in your shirt
shone like breaks in the clouds

as the night poured into our glasses.
How could I leave you there, at the museum,

a befuddled sentinel
guarding the 18th century?

I imagine you're a little homesick
and maybe your poor horse needs hay.

Here. Kick off your boots,
lie down and rest at last—

the stew on the stove is almost ready.
Here's a blanket and a pillow or two:

let us find what sleep affords us both
across the fading centuries,

where the poverty of your eternal station
meets the poverty in me.