Setting Sun.(Poem)

 
SETTING SUN 
 
   If you looked at the setting sun on a November Sunday in 1944 
   from a tarred rooftop 
   in New York City between the lines of washing hung 
 
   out to dry 
   like flags of surrender, would you too see what Eugenie Baizerman, 
   nee Silverman, 
 
   saw and set down in the raw pigments of vermilion and burnt sienna 
   on two canvas panels, 
   each four-and-a-half by three-and-a-half feet, because she didn't 
 
   have one piece 
   of canvas already stretched and sized and big enough? 
   Her painting is all 
 
   flames twisting up from a bonfire that roars, splutters, and spits 
   back at us. 
   An are welder's shower of sparks. Then I see 
 
   that …