Danniel Schoonebeek


Chimney Painting


In the next life I made you my life’s work.

I painted portraits of people that you’d never be.
I painted still lifes of wineskins you drank from.  

I painted landscapes of places I said in the old life
I wanted to take you come April.

Posed for me there might be a lovesick girl whose fingernails were bitten.
Posed for me there might be a woman of faith whose faith in god was shaken.

Arranged for me on a cutting board with half-drunk decanter and lemons,
I might find two clusters of crimson seedless shot through to the skin by half-light.   

Most troubling to me were the vistas, the glass beaches ransacked by brush,
the trails I might clear to sketch you a study of a lighthouse engulfed in mountain.
 

                        •


Such was the next life.
 

                        •
 

But much like the old life the next life was lorded by capital.

Of a day you might find me traipsing the arcade in search of hire. 
To see me, the commoners said, was to debate the very existence of me.

Of a man I am narrow and barely and my face I wear like a slander.
Study these eyes long enough and you might very well mistake them for isinglass.

Invoke my name and you might utter a word like wraith.

You might say layabout, you might say wastrel,
you might say yes, the gossip’s true, that man is a most dungeonable man.

I was the one so ragged in his smock
that even the bloodless, gamey young coroner

might commission me for a pittance
to paint portraits of the corpses he pitilessly tended.

I had problems being myself.
Along with many problems being.

One problem being:
as often as not the coroner’s dead

were obliged to be hauled off to burial
before said dead had time to permit me arrival. 

To these death sites I strode with my precious few paints
packed dignified and torpid in fish bladders.

Same place from which, upon studying these eyes,
the town poet once told me comes isinglass.
 

                        •

 
In the next life I knew
what I don’t yet know

but I knew what I knew
in the old life:

a sun like a scorn might lord above a willow,
and come the hottest days the bladders explode.
 

                        •


See me stride to my death sites with a tablecloth draped over my shoulders like skin.  

Days I might arrive
and reach into my haversack

only to find a hysteria of detonated color in my hands.

And so I worked in the next life
how I worked in the old life.

I painted the dead from memory.

Appeared to me there might be a fearless girl whose face was like a quiver.
Appeared to me there might be a woman of letters whose letters she’d burned in a fire.

Their faces from memory, I’d say to myself.

Like the lines I’d sketch when I might sketch you an elegy
for the man I imagined I was in the old life.

Often in the next life I was permitted to face down this question.
In half-light with half-drunk decanter, who was he? 

Commoners, I was the one who was shot through with love.

As soon as I’d speak this to the hard-eaten stars in the next life
the man I was in the old life would ascend from his tar to admonish me.

In the next life we don’t speak in abstractions, he’d tell me.

In the next life we paint portraits of people she’d never.
In the next life we paint still lifes she tasted. 

In the next life we hunt down and paint landscapes of places
you’ll never take her come April.

But I was the one who was shot through with love, I was.

Shot through with love, like some landscapes, the commoners say, 
are shot through with color until the skin but explodes. 


—for Floryn Honnet

Love Song

Don’t walk there forgetting me.  

The wrack-line of contempt

will be beached—

                       it’s beached

each time your eyes meet the sea.

And true there will be loosestrife

the field study

           warned you against

strewn like dementia

along the wrecked beach of nation.

True they will come

                (yellow themselves)

days in which the decaying forsythia

quarters itself

in the summer of the evening.

You off there walking

under sky you never asked to witness

(it’s wildfire

& camphor & grey)

  you who walk

with your hair pinned up on the beach

it’s that summer of the evening

don’t walk there forgetting me.


—for Hannah Jane Shepard

See also an interview with Danniel Schoonebeek about Trébuchet.

photo Jesse Dreyfus

Danniel Schoonebeek is the author of American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) and Trébuchet, a 2015 National Poetry Series selection (University of Georgia Press, 2016). A recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Foundation, recent work appears in Poetry, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

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