Wagon View
After Govert Flinck’s Landscape with Obelisk
If you could stand close enough
you could make out the carvings,
every shallow cut etched in
the sides of the monument,
decipher all the symbols,
names worked by hands, elbows of
travelers, this stone somehow
made greater when it is viewed
from afar, where fingers can’t
run along the hieroglyphs,
feel how time has softened them,
the long, tapered sigh to base
an invitation to see
not the sculpture itself but
what lies at your feet, broken
bits of clay, a few clouded
glass beads, shards of pottery,
and nearby what looks almost
like the bones of a cat or
some other small animal,
signs this was not arrival
but a stop on a longer
journey, whose miles unravel
beyond the bridge, a gnarled tree,
beyond the landscape itself,
where a thrush or magpie might
startle and then go quiet,
where everything else is still,
except for the crackle of
weeds or seed husks under a heel.
NOTE: On March 18, 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was subject to perhaps the most notorious art robbery in history. Govert Flinck’s Landscape with Obelisk was among the masterpieces stolen.
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© Robert Fillman
Robert Fillman is the author of The Melting Point (Broadstone, 2025), House Bird (Terrapin, 2022), and the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). Individual poems have appeared in venues such as Nashville Review, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, and Verse Daily, and elsewhere. An assistant professor of English at Kutztown University, he also serves as poetry editor at Pennsylvania English.
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