All the God-sized Fruit 9780773583016

Table of contents :
Cover
CONTENTS
I: A THOUSAND WORDS
Self-Portrait: Threads from an Art Forger's Diary
Doe in a Mint Green Clearing
Leaves or Paper or Wood
Edge of the Fountainebleau Forest
The Pink Undertones
The Drapes Floating All Around Me
Take It Back: An Ode to Shrimp Woman
A Thousand Words
Dead Skin Dust
Even Venus had to Learn to Love her Face
Ode to the Woman on the Bravo Espresso Coffee Can in Which I Store My Pens
The Captives Remain Serene
II: THE WORLD, GREEN AND DISARMING
All the God-Sized Fruit
By the Still Life Painter's Wife
Aftermath of the Still Life
Detail of Tulip
Inventing Great Schools of Fish
Still Life with Greasy Noodles: A Travelogue, a Work Poem
Poses of Statuary
Out of the Sumptuous Chaos
Into the Kitchens of the Burning City
The World, Green and Disarming
III: THE ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI POEMS
Fringes of Plot
What a Woman Can Do
A World Without Glass
Cooked Water
Perspective
Shade Garden of Your Bones
Emerald, Amethyst, Opal
Notes to the Poems
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations

Citation preview

All the God-Sized Fruit

The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series Editors: Nathalie Cooke and Joan Harcourt Selection Committee: Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, Eric Ormsby, Carolyn Smart, and Tracy Ware

TITLES

IN THE SERIES

Waterglass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway

All the God-Sized Fruit SHAWNA LEMAY

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© Shawna Lemay 1999 ISBN 0-7735-1902-5 Legal deposit first quarter 1999 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper Reprinted 2000 McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Lemay, Shawna, 1966All the God-Sized fruit (MacLennan poetry series) ISBN 0-7735-1902-5

I. Title. II. Series. PS8573.E5358A74 1999 c8n / .54 098-901378-2 PR9I99.3.L433A64 1999

This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10/13 Sabon.

for Rob and for my parents

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CONTENTS

I A THOUSAND WORDS

Self-Portrait: Threads from an Art Forger's Diary 3 Doe in a Mint Green Clearing 13 Leaves or Paper or Wood 17 Edge of the Fountainebleau Forest 23 The Pink Undertones 28 The Drapes Floating All Around Me 31 Take It Back: An Ode to Shrimp Woman 3 5 A Thousand Words 39 Dead Skin Dust 43 Even Venus had to Learn to Love her Face 47 Ode to the Woman on the Bravo Espresso Coffee Can in Which I Store My Pens 50 The Captives Remain Serene 53 II THE WORLD, GREEN AND DISARMING

All the God-Sized Fruit 59 By the Still Life Painter's Wife 6z Aftermath of the Still Life 64 Detail of Tulip 66 Inventing Great Schools of Fish 68 Still Life with Greasy Noodles: A Travelogue, a Work Poem 71 Poses of Statuary 75 Out of the Sumptuous Chaos 78

Into the Kitchens of the Burning City 81 The World, Green and Disarming 84 III

THE ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI POEMS

Fringes of Plot 89 What a Woman Can Do 93 A World Without Glass 9 6 Cooked Water 98 Perspective 101 Shade Garden of Your Bones 103 Emerald, Amethyst, Opal 109 Notes to the Poems 111 Acknowledgments 113 List of Illustrations 115

Vlll

A THOUSAND

WORDS

... it is only in telling another's story that one can see into oneself. - Sunetra Gupta

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Self-Portrait: Threads from an Art Forger's Diary

To experience beauty, truly one must find one's heart. Reach fingers delicately through the space between ribs as though they were Venetian blinds. Stroke the suspicious heart the cold or green or unpractised heart like the ears of a lost dog. Who can say they have done this? 55-

Some day i will think of Penelope pull a thread, start the unravelling. But for now i efface the lines of influence. Bury them writhing deeply beneath snow. If i have been enamoured by the work of Vermeer's forger, Van Meegeren who will know. I paint until my hands and heart are not my own. And then, the forgery.

3

It is the process with which you become obsessed. Could Penelope have woven her endless tapestry had she not loved the smell of wool the sensation of dyed thread on her fingers? Had she not loved working by candle light watching the half-born figures, their incomplete gestures the way a scene drops around the ankles. She had to have loved the unweaving as well as the weaving. !{•

The Spanish Forger. Lovely labyrinth of i6th century panels and manuscripts forged in the i9th century. A body of work by a single artist. No, a skeleton. And lumps of clay. The nicest thing being no one knows if the Spanish Forger was Spanish and not Dutch or French or Italian. Or male or female. There's the art. *

Is there such a thing as self-effacement?

4

55-

A single gesture can be sabotage. The so-called plaster forger from Tuscany painted a renaissance man in contemplation the quill of his pen tickling his chin. A ipth century gesture. One forger's renaissance ladies were uncannily like Greta Garbo. *

An art forger is like a novelist. Read any great novel long enough, closely enough follow each sentence off the page. You will know what vintage of wine the writer drank what sort of restaurants were frequented during the writing of the novel. You could give accurate descriptions of table cloths, crystal, cutlery. You would know what obsessions scratched how high up the door.

5

>'r

Tools of the trade. Canvas, brushes, wood stretchers, nails to match century and locale of the painting's origin. I have paint boxes from a variety of centuries a gift from all the irresolute weekend painters. Badger-hair brushes, sable ones, baby-hair brushes. I have books telling me when certain pigments were employed. When to use lapis lazuli or white oxide. For drawings, i have a collection of old books from which i snip end papers. I have ink recipes calling for crushed beetles, squid ink, dried partridge blood, a rusty nail, rainwater, gum arabic, ground robin's eggshell. Jf-

Next, the forger must choose characters steal from old plots, embellish. But unlike the novelist the forger must convince the eye that something new is old.

6

«•

There are altarpieces believed to keep plagues at bay. They are said to be unfakeable because of the indentations left on them by a multitude of kisses made by adoring lips. There is one way. To press your own lips there everyday for a year. Altering the pressure from the kiss of duty to one of ardent faith, passionate zeal. I have not been plagued, since. #

Trompe I'oeil is illusion. Forgery is elusion. #

In homage to the Spanish Forger i am creating my own Italian Renaissance painter. Some of her paintings, forgotten as they were in carriage houses and attics are tattered, faded, sometimes punctured. Some burned in fires and survive singed. The forger must have the fortitude to watch a quarter year's work be consumed by flames. Must know how much water will be required to douse them. Must listen for a whisper.

7

*:-

A whispering gallery is a vast room where acoustics are such that a whisper in one place in the room is audible at a great distance in another place in that room. Time is full of such galleries. x

Here is a trick. There are experts who, claiming to know the taste of centuries put the tip of their tongue on a corner of a painting. The forger must take care to match the contrived provenance with the taste of the finished product. Lord so and so smoked a Havana cigar. A millionaire fancied lobster bisque and took it in the library at half past six in his buttoned brown leather chair for a decade. Upon his death the painting was bequeathed to a museum where a layer of clarified air, odourless but for the tincture of hairspray and perfumes clings to the surface.

8

#

And yet, stay with me. The art forger's work is not yet done. Now, she must sell her work. She must be in three minds at once. Her own. That of the painter she forges, and that of the buyer. She must know greed, desire. She must know rapture. She must know the heart. *

In Greek mythology a god may have many attributes and often appears in more than one story. The gods are not so unlike humans. #

Think, we vacation with cameras instead of sketch pads. In an art gallery, who reads the card beside the painting first? We sit in movie theatres, cry at tragedy noiselessly instead of shouting, yes, i have felt such pain and anguish and it is intolerable. We leave the theatre and speak of fine acting, convincing sets. We believe in our power over these pictures these scenes we have witnessed.

9

In a movie, if a well-known painting is required for a set the copyist need not take great pains with it so powerful are the distractions. Soundtrack, candle light, a well-placed chair, enviable dialogue, beautiful actors gesturing as we do in dreams. #

I sell all my paintings in the darkest, coldest days of winter. Outside is snow, the world dormant. My forgeries elude experts in all seasons but i admit i am fond of the mid-winter seduction of the retina. I play music. I burn sticks of frankincense and myrrh. Fill marble bowls with cloves, cardamom, turmeric. Melted snow. In a country where spices are not grown it is possible to work on a person's senses with a few threads of saffron wound into your hair. If there is a bowl of ground ginger i speak the word as a charm. In an accent from an invented country i say ginger. It is repeated, always repeated. It is cognac, swirled in the mouth and spat out with regret. Spat out with regret. 10

In short, my client adds her name, or his name to the provenance. What is ownership? What is true, what false? You will ask me these things and truly i do not know. How does the heart learn to see? What is beauty? Truly, i know not. One day, i pull at a thread. #

I am at a table drinking Moroccan mint green tea. The mahogany table is old, gouged. There are crumbs strewn about its surface and i am driving them over precipices, into gashes.

ii

Doe in a Mint Green Clearing Rachel Ruysch, 1664-1750. Not exactly a household name. Painter of bouquets, blossoms. Most men wouldn't touch the subject with a ten foot pole. Too feminine. Too mired in detail. Great thoughts don't waft from carnations, they said. Perhaps she wanted to paint the bodies of gods in white gauzy robes, damp, billowing. An unsuitable subject for a woman. She wanted to paint her own unsuitable body the delicate rivers stretched into her belly the purple tributaries on her ankles. She wanted to paint life and death and love, great tragedies, battle scenes, myths, the terrible weakness of beauty, a doe in a mint green clearing, wild flowers in a field without end.

*3

She worked in the kitchen, one eyebrow cocked the smell of dying flowers always in her hair. Oil paint on her fingers, cheek smudged red. If you look closely at her paintings you see the intricate system of veins below the surface of petals, leaves. And in one arrangement, there are twelve assorted winged insects, one butterfly, one beetle. Vying for nectar. The cruel beauty of the ordinary moments before war. The bee, that is Zeus disguised. The beetle Ophelia attending her own funeral. There is something else you should know. The bouquet. It was not there to the side of the easel. The tulip does not bloom beside the rose, beside the lily, the poppy, the iris. She painted them one by one little white and pink and orange lies refusing history, seasons. The impossible bouquets a way of passing knowledge on the curious differences of flora.

14

And see there, tucked behind a tangle of foliage. The invented flower, the most fragile one its petals almost transparent. It is the most beautiful bloom. The hidden one the one she most wants us to know. This is the knowledge passed down through the bones of the wrist back of the eye.

15

Leaves or Paper or Wood But devotion to art also involves something unselfish. Some people give their lives to others, and some give their lives to an idea. - Paula Modersohn-Becker

Before allowing me to marry my King Red, Red Rex, my fire-haired love, Otto Modersohn my father sent me to cooking school in Berlin. Two months of blank canvas. A person who has had a premonition of her own young death should read every sacrifice as a sign. I refused to understand it though i knew, of course, i knew. I was a cage of finches one for each day i was there. Each morning i would awake to find one bird in the bottom lungs the size of stucco stones collapsed cold, among the paper and droppings.

17

I was learning to care for my husband's stomach but kept returning in my mind to a painting i had seen once in London. Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding Portrait. Symbols aside the carefully made bed for Chastity, the mangy pooch for Fidelity the cut and design of the woman's high-waisted apple-green cloak conspires against her. As i'm sure does the blood in her veins flowing to her belly leaving her hands cold, feet and ankles numb. She could be five months pregnant. Later, for a time, i would become obsessed with the belly, a woman's round belly. But then, at cooking school, i was bored, agitated. I didn't expect to be sprinkling cinnamon on roast of swan rubbing ginger on baked bear's paws. The potato was glorious enough baked, boiled or mashed. I was master of the potato of the hearty roast beef with gravy of the oven fire, the stove-top flame.

18

I loved him fiercely those two months. Perhaps more than i would again. Away from him i loved him. I loved what i couldn't have. I loved what i imagined him to be. There are a hundred ways to phrase that. It is the sort of love that is so real afterwards it seems, to the lovers, utterly false, made up. The heart is a great distance from the stomach. I know that now. If i had a daughter and she had the inclination to marry i would have her prepare a banquet for all the young men of her choice every course burned to cinders. I would have her choose the man who ate with the most zeal. I who was so fond of skating in the coldest shiver of winter. I was on fire with how many tiny fires. Some for him, some for my paintings. I thought it would become one large fire and then i would become someone. I would be renewed, released like the seed pods of a certain kind of tree detached only in the extreme heat of a forest fire. How many ways are there to put out a fire?

19

I had forgotten the fire contained on the head of a match. I had forgotten that one fire may be extinguished by another. That jealousy puts out fires, and inequality, and subservience. I had forgotten what an old metaphor it is. I had forgotten all that i never knew about fires. Everything i learned showed me how to put them out. Never how to escape, not really. Never how to jump a spark across a cut line. How to walk into flames. It seemed, at times, the fires died. But there were embers and i carried them in the skirt of my dress from Worpswede to Paris. And the breeze came as if from the moon. Some men will not have a woman in flames. Otto would be astonished to hear he was one of them. My paintings wanted oxygen his were soil. So he wanted me to till mine. He wanted my paintings to be a fallowed field.

2,0

In Paris, i burned. The fires burning for my art, for me. Who can say by looking at a flame what fuels it? Leaves or paper or wood. Canvas, paint. The Fayum portraits discovered in Egypt were in the Louvre. It was the custom to place one of these panels painted with encaustic - pigment suspended in hot wax on the wrapped, mummified body of the dead. I studied the portraits and saw myself there suspended like the other spirits in wax that was once boiling, spitting but was now cool and quiet. If the painter had daubed encaustic on his skin it would have left a permanent mark like a pucker, a kiss. Today, i painted myself, camellia in hand remembering i once said if i painted three good pictures i would happily die i would go with camellias in my hair like the girl in one of the Fayum portraits.

21

My soul hungers for more. / am writing this in my housekeeping book sitting in the kitchen cooking a roast of veal

2,2.

Edge of the Fountainebleau Forest Indeed you have to love your art in order to live in pools of blood. - Rosa Bonheur

Fathma, let me whisper in your greying golden ear my lovely pet, pretty lioness i belong to you as we lie here in the gillyflowers and cow-chewed grass with grasshoppers. Tell me how does an old woman find herself at the edge of a forest with a lioness? As a girl i would go to the butcher with mother before she died when i was eleven and i remember looking at hanging plucked chickens and geese. In my mind i would paint their feathers back on or work out the motion of a leg of lamb piece a cow back together rump, ribs, shoulder, tongue. By the time i had painted The Horse Fair bob-tailed percherons, big muscled, dappled gray palomino and albino, Arabian and Friesian pulling and straining, rearing by the time i had painted this i had examined every bone and raw meat muscle in the bodies of worn to death ponies and draft horses broken-legged steeple chasers and flat track racers.

23

I would saunter to the abattoir drawing case under one arm parasol under the other in my ladies' shoes and men's trousers. In my pocket the paper verifying i had leave to wear them another six months. The world, i suppose, in an uproar to see that a woman does in fact have two legs. Same world that would rather i risked my neck riding side-saddle as though i were a kitten draped on a crushed velvet piece of parlour furniture. I was unflinching. Pried fur from carcass to see face muscles thin like crepes. Pulled mane to reveal the long muscles of the neck. Legs i would strip of fur then move them as though they were stepping from a stall. I would remove a certain muscle hold it in the palm of my left hand and draw it with charcoal, the inevitable smears of stagnant blood. I stood in pools of blood and shredded tendons a man here and there

*5

looking over my shoulder staring as though i had drawn a map of his neighbourhood with shops he had never noticed before. I was unflinching at the abattoir but later at the stables i would find some honest old mare bury my face under her dusty coarse mane my hand on her twitching withers and pray. Then i rubbed flies from her ears back of her knees. Once i said to sweet Nathalie i have never painted you. But certainly, she said, i am the star-faced chestnut Arabian beside the dark one, rearing that kicks out with an elegant hoof. It seems a human predilection to see our own spirit in nature but it is the animal in us you paint, she said. The eye looking at us in Plowing in the Nivernais is not a human one we recognize it as the look ill-kept wives have. Cowed.

26

Another time i said to Nathalie i am afraid i am using you and she said oh and laughed, said you may muse me all you like, Rosa, we shall muse each other. Now, Fathma, my dear Nathalie is gone i have Anna to paint with at this chateau on the edge of the Fountainebleau Forest. Those who visit here, i have noticed, wander around in the shadow of the forest. I tell them of the paths lined with needles and peat of oaks and elms of moss and fungus clinging to bark and the tree clinging back. Tell them of the clearing deep within the woods the tree that has fallen across it upon which a body may rest and be refreshed. Invariably they return from their skirting to the chateau to drink port and to smoke a nice cigarette having a great feeling for the forest speaking of the clearing with some intensity and having great hope of some day making an excursion there.

2,7

The Pink Undertones The stickpin women come to look at us now: me, my sister and our niece Louysa. I can hear them draw their breath in and their shiny lips open as their noses move towards us discretely towards the pink undertones of our painted flesh. Sometimes i see stomach-tightening fear, self-loathing. Sometimes their eyes shine and they bite at their lower lips. Always, their hands are clasped tightly laced together behind their backs. And this is how i am immortalised. A naiad. My right arm stretched around my lovely sister's back my left arm crooked through Louysa's. I am twisted and arching and wound up in the thick rope snaking around our arms. I remember in the studio Peter said imagine the froth of the sea around your calves and we stood by the stiff red velvet curtain on the dusty wood floor. And the smell of camomile essence in my sister's long blonde hair and mine freshly washed.

28

I remember feeling so sure of myself. The opulent flesh around my waist, the fullness of my thighs, my derriere. I could feel the air in my lungs, the closeness of my heart. I felt soft and strong. Delicious. Powerful. Posing in the studio those afternoons the sun warming our bones i never would have imagined this word Rubensesque. This is what they call women now whose bodies are like ours. And the women cringe as they would shrink at certain observations made by small children. I remember afterwards we would sit in silk robes drinking wine with crusty bread and lumps of rich cheese. And later there were cream filled pastries dusted with powdered sugar and cups of hot chocolate. There would be a chill in the air but my cheeks were warm and i could feel my skin all over. Could still imagine the sea foam and the warm green water lapping around my ankles. But the sea doesn't matter any more. I am caught here for the gaunt-faced ones looking at me.

29

The Drapes Floating All Around Me I was drowning before i reached the Tiber water climbing the bones of my ribcage. I was drowning before i stood as i am now the hem of my sanguine dress sipping wandering in the river my heels in mud singing every crazy little song i know under my breath caught by the intricacies of reflection sky, trees, dress, face and the floating twigs and fluff. Below the surface fish and frogs. At the bottom untroubled stones. I was made a monster because no one would look at me. Wouldn't reach into the current tangle their fingers in my green matted hair amongst the white slick worms whose home must be my scalp. Wouldn't try to catch my lolling stone eyes when i surfaced or throw a branch towards my lizard-scaled hand.

3i

Simple to see this way a certain development of sight. The way an artist turns a flat surface into a window has us believe the world offers itself in perfect squares, rectangles. I worked in darkness or by a small orange candle flame extinguished in the whirl and frenzy of silk shirts with my eyes half closed or tight shut. Shut there are colours i've never seen in Rome though they must be there the green of moss under a dead tree lavender, a bump on a salamander's back.

3*

I learned to feel the difference between velvet, brocade, organdie when a dropped cape brushed my ankle. I know the sound a waistcoat will make when it lands on terra cotta tiles before he has the door closed based on the number of buttons, trimming, type of fabric. I know how many tiny lives occupy the room spiders, rats, cockroaches, ants with him and me. I know whether he will light a pipe afterwards by the way he holds his lips when dropping his fancy pantaloons. I can guess at his worth by the way he touches coins in comparison to how he handled my breasts. I know if he washes his hands in rose water which pretty scent he splashes on the back of his neck. I thought i could erase the way he would imagine me when he left the room by noticing the folds in the bed's heavy red drapes. I thought i could erase the tiredness of the reasons i worked in that room with intense observation seeing all a drowning woman would see.

33

I sewed a plain dress cut from the bed's drapery took my hair down, loosed the dozen tight ringlets washed it and rinsed it in vinegar. I want to see the room on my eyelids while i move down the river on my back the drapes floating all around me.

34

Take It Back: An Ode to Shrimp Woman Hey, shrimp woman, peeled, de-veined. Hey, octopus arms, hey, side-show girl. Yeah, i'm talkin' to you there on that chaise lounge you in the tasselled turban and bangles you with the peacock feather fan you lying there on Turkish blue and gold silk. Hey, flower fingers, wax doll, cold statue, exotic corpse. Hey, race horse, alabaster giraffe, your back's too long you can't even walk. Hey, platypus, swan-lady, you funny snake, lazy serpent. Are you plural, you're shaped like a big old S. Part painting, part word. Others have called you monster, hybrid but i won't. My little plucked peacock, my darling plum pudding my charming slab of veal. You are as limp as a wet worn-out dishcloth. You impossible frog, you dish of rose petals. We could be friends you know. Would you tell me what hides under your turban, behind the drapery. Could you tell me how you take your tea. 35

Sticks and stones, you've been de-boned tell me which names turn you black and blue. Pretty dumpling, your wilting tulip-stem spine. Poor land-locked fishy poor girl. There are those who would have you slip back into those yellow rubber gloves pick up that feather duster. There are those who would line up to kiss your plastic poppy lips make you real again. There are those who would paint over you. And yes, there are those who would assume your position. Foolishly, i wait for your next trick wait for your body to shape the other letters.

37

A Thousand Words It began this way. When he left Milan and was received here in the Viennese court, spring of 1562, i was simply the one assigned to clean his studio. Empty of him but full of a marvellous clutter wooden bowls and earthen bowls and china bowls of fruit, twigs, moss, shells. Until the first time when i came at the end of the day and he was there we didn't speak though he stared at me as though he could see me. I did my best to be unobtrusive. The second time, he said he was Arcimboldo, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. And the third time he asked me to sit for him. Doing what i do. He admired my ability to transform, metamorphose. The way a maid can disappear into walls, china cabinets, banquet tables, a flower garden. He would hand me a jug of sea water, a vase of gardenias, a bowl of oranges and grapes. And i would open my face with the objects in my lap and become them.

39

They called him a magician which is fair. He was the only one who knew my name recognised my plain, ordinary face plucked me from the kitchen like a rabbit from a hat. I write this down not because i want to be believed certainly not to discredit only to record my own face the roses my mother always said i had in my cheeks. I have heard a picture is worth one thousand words and since i have no paint, i write instead, counting. I have heard of la Gioconda, her enigmatic smile, her expressive eyebrows. I thought of her while posing for Air. He set a caged canary beside me and i imprisoned within my features so many birds held them there as long as i could twisting their tiny necks, squinching their wings. Of course, he became more demanding. I was to become an allegory of winter or autumn but also to appear as Rudolph or Maximilian from twenty paces. And still holding the shape of all the leaves and pumpkins, grapes, roots and fungus. He thought i could be so much and disappear, too. 40

Before this, i had transformed to hide, to escape; but i came to know beauty in its parts, and ugliness too. They are not so different; i was equally captive to each. And what was once a trick that would have seen me stoned or pickled, mid-change and placed in a gargantuan glass jar for one of those travelling wonder chambers. One of their grotesques along with the two-headed calf and the cyclops dog. What was once a gift i loathed was something i came to love in myself. I had seen pictures of Daphne changing into a tree. And i tried that, too, in the forest with no one chasing but the gesture was empty. Later i went back to the studio and flipped the pages of books imagined breeze rummaging in my mouse hair. Reading, i let whatever wanted to, attach itself. Didn't try to remember waited to see how things would appear later as if in a dream.

41

Of course, the final product was bizarre, incongruous, and yes, grotesque. That is what it is to be a chameleon of sorts changing into wallpaper or wood-grain and not being able to stop yourself. He gave me more than that though, and i seized it. I learned how it feels to be both hunter and hunted, feast and reveller, fisher and catch, florist and cut stem. I knew what it was like to laugh at jokes i didn't find the least bit amusing. And at least this sort of transformation required concentration, a certain knowledge of the world. And Arcimboldo never presumed to know me in part or whole, though he brought me books from the library painted me as librarian composed of books with no titles. So i could give up dreaming of trees a certain way of holding my lips.

42

Dead Skin Dust Having devoured many suppers betrayed by each one of them i have come to examine the patient's history its illustrious skin decaying, deciphering. To see time and circumstance partake of The Last Supper peck away at the scene of betrayal. It has been massaged with glues and fixatives painted over by clumsy hands. It has endured bomb blasts, wars, revolutions. The black smoke of candles. The dead skin dust of the faithful. Once someone tried to pry it from the wall assuming it was fresco theorizing on properties of the flesh without visiting the body, the head. Failing removal, a door was sliced swiftly through the table skirt. A simple matter of convenience as though entrances were not mysterious gifts.

43

Most recently The Last Supper has been restored by a woman. For sixteen years her head pressed against a microscope, scalpel in hand. The scent of roses at her neck, her wrists. She develops a shameless intimacy with gestures of colour and light the frailty and strength of the outline of forms. Working at the picture one scale at a time scraping away at the butterfingered patch jobs, the cosmetic surgery. To get at the original which despite all attempts continues to flake away, lift the way paper floats up from a bonfire. The way lipstick gets talked off. While she works in the cool quiet she can picture the spring that trickles twenty three feet below. Can taste moisture on her lips. The damp that quickens scales from the wall. Chews them in bits and chunks.

44

She knows the inevitable: the blank wall stripped of its skin. The slides projected showing the picture in various stages of decline until the menu is irretrievable. Until we are left with burger, fries and medium coke. But it is in between the slides in a split second the eye finds a blue flake clinging and a gold one. And that is where the picture appears.

45

Even Venus Had to Learn to Love Her Face Deface. Spoil appearance or beauty of. Make illegible. In 1914, a woman, a suffragette entered the National Gallery in London a hatchet in her muff. In protest she slashed The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez. Venus, goddess of beauty, goddess of love recumbent on black taffeta her back to us. Near the centre of the painting is a mirror held by Cupid. In the reflection, her face is blurred, illegible. Last autumn i stood in front of this painting. The damage long since sewn up, effaced. If you turn the canvas around there would be so many stitches in a row a tiny spine. Who can blame Velazquez for painting a beautiful woman?

47

In the Judgement of Paris Venus is deemed more beautiful than both Hera and Athena. But then, she could give him Helen. And what are riches and wisdom next to a beautiful woman. Paris hands Venus the golden apple inscribed for the fairest. And she takes it as though it means something. It has been said that Vanity is the worship of death. We are not goddesses, we are mortal and the mirror betrays us, betrays me. I am graceless there. Recumbent before mirrors. There are questions i would not trouble to ask my mirror on the wall. Have you ever failed to recognize yourself in a mirror? Ask me if i am beautiful and i will laugh. I have catalogued my flaws. Could rival the Poets with an anti-blazon. Could rival the Song of Songs its lips like a scarlet thread cheeks like an orchard of pomegranates an orchard with all the most exquisite spices.

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Who has visited the orchard of the Golden Apples? Inscribed one with her own name. Did the woman in her stylish red muff, matching chapeau and fur-collared cape the woman with the bone-handled engraved hatchet cheeks like an orchard of golden apples did she love her face? I want her to be beautiful, fashionable even. Because who wants to read a poem about an ugly woman gone crazy with a hatchet acting irrationally in a perfectly sane world. Because even Venus had to learn to love her face. Poe said the most poetic subject in the world is the death of a beautiful young woman. I have said she is beautiful but when she looks in the mirror it is spoiled. She is mortal. Is not this enough?

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Ode to the Woman on the Bravo Espresso Coffee Can in Which I Store My Pens If i weren't so jittery i'd begin with a standing ovation clapping until my soft palms stung. Hollering - sensational, brilliant, bravissimo. If i weren't so shaky, if my stomach wasn't weeping i'd ride in on a frothy wave of ekphrastic exuberance. Describe her blue-black hair, big red-lips smile, her green gaping blouse, pirate earrings. The dainty china cup with indecipherable fleurs proffered on red fingernails more or less eternally. All this bordered by lemon-yellow and tomato-red. If i weren't so hepped up on mud, on joe maybe i'd talk about John Berger the space between word and picture. The way advertising can turn you into glue. Slide in Marshall McLuhan. Madge, i'd be thinking, you're soaking in it.

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If i weren't so bugged from this perk, this dirty dishwater, this battery acid. If i weren't so bloody polite, if i could just say no. If there were no such thing as a bottomless cup. I'd slip into the art historical compare Mama Bravo to Mona Lisa. I'd check out the archaeological. Imagine this city buried in volcanic ash like Pompeii. And some day i'm dug up at my desk hand gripping a cup of fossilized coffee. If i weren't so grogged on the brew, the ink, the varnish remover i'd talk about the face that launched a thousand demitasses of espresso. Mama, i'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a demitasse today. But Mama don't give me lemon zinger or camomile. Don't give me raspberry thriller or peppermint tea. No steamed milk, no Celestial Seasons. No Nestle's Quik or Ovaltine. Mama, you're tired. Mama, let me take that cup.

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The Captives Remain Serene

If you were to see the words woman in blue reading a letter and you were unfamiliar with the Vermeer painting what is conjured? Her jacket is Madonna blue, colour of sky after a divine exodus of billowy clouds. Colour of truth, clarity. Prison walls are sometimes painted this shade of blue so the captives remain serene. The woman could be pregnant. Immaculate conception. Or, her jacket holds the memory of a distant fashion sense. The pearl is a symbol of the virgin, of light shining in the darkness, of perfection and also of love. It is the child in the mother's womb. On the wall behind her, there is a map of Holland marked with ochre. There are two blue chairs pierced with gold upholstery nails. She stands before a table on which lie her abandoned pearls the first page of the letter she reads.

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When a picture is described in words this is called ekphrasis. It is a word that begins with a sound like clearing the throat, an introduction to the ineffable. It is a painting about boundaries. She in her interior the child in the interior of her. The map a lesson in demarcation its meandering lines blurred through the effects of light and shadow. The table is a barrier to the unseen window. The frame separates the painting from the wall on which it hangs. It is impossible to describe a painting in words and yet there is a long poetic tradition of ekphrasis. Where does that which is lost in such a translation go? When an earring is lost in a couch often a necklace is found instead. In what is called an x-radiograph you can see that originally Vermeer painted a fur trim on the bottom of the blue jacket and that the jacket flared out more at the back. He extended the map a smidgen to the left.

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In a letter words are often crossed off, scribbled out. There are false starts crumpled balls at the feet of the writer. There are letters sent that simply cannot be erased. There are letters composed in the mind, never set down immaculate conceptions. It is a painting brimming with words though no place names are distinguishable on the map. The viewer of the painting can see none of the words the woman reads pearls forgotten her lips parted, head bent, enraptured. The page could be blank but we know it is not because of the expression on her face. A writer cannot write a blank page unless it is a lacuna. In the painting, the letter is the place without boundaries. This poem yearns to be that blank page.

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It is a love letter. From her merchant husband, away on business. It is a billet-doux from a man she once loved, not her husband. Is the father of the child the husband? Or, it is not a love letter at all but a letter from her dearest friend a woman who also looks well in blue and loves her pearls on the desk not so much the way they feel encircling her neck. Or, yes, it is a love letter. And it contains the perfect expression of love. It seems her lover is there in the room, too. She feels his hand on her cheek, his fingers caught in tendrils of hair. She is in the room and she is with her love in the streets of a city she'll never visit. The painting is an interior though the letter is neither inside nor outside. It cannot be domesticated, cleaned or locked. It is the light shining in through some imagined window.

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THE WORLD, GREEN AND

DISARMING

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All the God-Sized Fruit The end of a long winter i write this beside French doors open to spring. The painting he gave me over my desk breeze on my bare feet i meditate on god-sized fruit, pomegranates. The philosophy of feng shui flows from the thinking that the stone pathways making up your life are directly affected by your everyday surroundings. To improve the quality of the pathway, smoothness of the stones, the moss there you must improve the space in which you live. The poem is a house and in its rooms we shove stained coffee tables, spacious armoires, excessive buffets we build carp pools in the basement we line up mirrors to reflect other mirrors and we grow strange and lovely creeping plants in brittle terra cotta pots. They are here sometimes purely because it felt right and years later, in another house, you see how that one plant led you there to this other place.

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And so i have hung this picture over my desk. How can i describe it here, under this roof there is a setting aside of that old competition, Olympic game that pits poet against artist word against picture. It is enough to say there are pomegranates, whole and halved, the back of a silver spoon, a bouquet of geraniums, a single blossom in the foreground. And in the centre, a clear glass plate etched with plain white flowers. On the plate, a pomegranate, sliced in three. Waiting. To be taken up. So close i can set my pen down, reach my hand up and into the picture. This fruit a symbol of my own power to make something happen, to make a small choice. To make something mythical of my life in my own way.

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It is the moment in the myth after which anything might follow. I can refuse the temptation or i can eat one juicy seed at a time. After which i could be transformed into a mermaid or a Guernsey cow. Or give birth to angry young goddesses. Or see the world turned into a bed of geraniums. Or i could be separated from my dearly loved mother for one third of the year, the earth during that time desolate, cold, infertile. But forget about that for now let me have my moment. Let me have everything him, my mother, all the god-sized fruit i can eat. Let me have everything and keep myself, too. And let me feel spring breeze on bare feet facing north polishing stones.

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By the Still Life Painter's Wife Did Willem KalPs wife say look, i have brought home this nautilus cup filled with light from my merchant brother's house. On it Neptune stands on a fearsome whale head and below Jonah dives from the monster's jaws. Or, here is a lemon carefully peeled the rind a curling ribbon. And here is a lobster, darling, i have cleaned all the meat from it so you may have it in your studio the brilliant smooth orange-red. Did Chardin's wife say i baked this splendid brioche today and trimmed it with mint leaves from the plant in the backyard. I'll leave it for you on the sideboard by the candy dish, decanter, apples and cherries. In case you're hungry, dear man. Did Rembrandt's wife say the slaughtered ox has been trussed up in the shed will you go and inspect it, my darling.

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And the wives of de Heem and Aertsen, Bosschaert and Brueghel. Did they gather flowers in ditches arrange them on the console bake fussy confectioneries and bread just so barter assiduously at market for exotic fruit place it carelessly in unusual china bowls buy pears with attention to length and curve of stem coax juice from wasting fruit blend the concoction until pink-orange-red some unnameable colour.

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Aftermath of the Still Life After the implications there is the silence of decay. Later the stems turn water sludge-green. The perfume from flowers falls heavy into carpet fibers. The pears ripen in the wire bowl and the room fills with that, too. Pomegranates turn into rattles and weeks later a pumpkin lifted from the table is black bottomed, blown out. Later sangria from the jumble of fruit makes my head dangle, lifts my body. But first, there is the urge to eat pressing upon me. And the desire to restore order to all this kerfuffle to fold velvet and wind ribbon to chop and blend the cut open, the gashed, the wounded. To close the lake trout's jelly eyes.

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And still i sit while the sun leaks in guileless. Remembering the drama of objects placed on a table revelations of proximity and sunshine. And yes, looking out the window i contemplate the variousness of death particularly the silence of starving. But because of where i sit i also think of orchards full of pink-tinged blossoms of flowers growing heedless in fields and ditches. It is with a certain amount of callousness with which my thoughts skip from famine to fecundity. And i'm never sure what to do with that so i remain in the complicated mess with the sun coming in look at intricate shadows.

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Detail of Tulip I. In a blue velour housecoat my mother her sad beautiful eyes long ago i promised i would never write about her. I couldn't have known how large the territory of love. Its shape unknown, uncharted. The source finally undiscoverable.

My mother of the bare white walls has come to love certain paintings. To feel joy at five in the morning looking alone with her coffee in darkness and through the sun's rising. Hair damp from the shower hand by the ashtray on the white table. Before this i was afraid imagining her by herself. But already i have said too much. The details of her life escape a canary from the cage to the curtains.

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II. There is a dream i have in which i wake up possessing the skills of a painter. But it is a dream for when i try to paint her she is a stick figure, cave painting and i never know where to place her hands. All around her strips of colour though she can't abide by abstract painting blues and greens, yellow and splattered with pink the colour we don't agree on. In each of us resides the failed artist. But here in the brain's dimly lit temperature-controlled cave galleries here are the ones she painted for me. This is love. Best described helplessly. Grand sweeping gestures. The mouth wide open. The heart a tulip unclenching in early morning sun.

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Inventing Great Schools of Fish The sun won't stay for dinner its mid-winter manners abominable i sit beside glass looking at snow almost blue at this time of day, of year wait to turn on lights resistant to metamorphosis when glass becomes smoky mirror. The three trout Rob used in his still life whisked in and out so the house wouldn't hold their memory are now simmering in a stock pot. Surrounded by gerbera and grapes, apples, pears their sleek, grey, spotted bodies were metallic, other-worldly difficult in their wholeness glistening in the weak, reaching mid-day sun so far away from water.

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I understand why my mother never taught me to cook why she wanted me to visit the kitchen an explorer, an outsider to arrive at fish stock and hollandaise without preconception a tourist in a remote village uncommonly dressed speaking only the language of neighbouring countries. So i cook the way Chardin painted kitchen scenes. Hungry, furtive, shy. Memorising the colours of yam and cantaloupe. The smell of a tomato, its deviation from hothouse perfection. Braced for failure. Always uncertain, always hopeful of the revelations stirring in the mediums of sauce and stock. And so i approach the curve of the eggplant thinking of how Chardin painted a freshly killed chicken - its feet stretching out of a cloth bag the way great round loaves of bread fit cradled on a woman's hip the way aprons drape and fold over dresses. And i cut into skin looking at the purple-black reflection in the stainless-steel knife blade.

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When the light must come on i imagine those who stroll after dark by the houses with curtains drawn, blinds shut by the naked windows of illuminated living rooms. Sight-seers. Stopping now and again in front of the house that looks like no one is there. Looking in at people eating low-fat dinners on coffee tables reading bad news calm in armchairs or watching the flicker-pulse of the television. Centred over sofas are images of water lilies or the Swiss Alps or palm trees and blue water. Pictures as significant as cave drawings ensuring safety, a good hunt. I pose, smiling into what i can no longer see in case anyone is there. Inventing great schools of fish thrashing below the surface of snow.

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Still Life with Greasy Noodles: A Travelogue, a Work Poem The ship - your ocean cruiser - has docked and from the port bow you can see me through opera glasses on my break from the bookstore in the foodcourt. On the table a steaming plate of greasy noodles a copy of the Quill and Quire my elbow - head connected to hand. Take down your glasses now think of me at work, the bookseller. Too rare is the magic carpet. Patterned in red and yellow, green, black. I roll it tightly, tie it with twine. Gingerly holding it all the way to the bottom of the bag. But then there are the cigarette boxes their slender contents kissed with pink lipstick. The boiling pots, the UFOs, the melting bricks of butter, the boxes of sawdust dressed like promise and light and open doors. And there is more than that but not this morning.

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Take up your jewelled glasses again. The foodcourt makes you think of paintings of markets and meat stalls. Grouse and partridges, chickens hanging from gnarled feet. A fine example of the type being Pieter Aertson's Butcher Stall, 1551. The slaughtered pig - this means the death of a believer. And the abundance of fresh meat - that is lust. But what means the head of the cow the yapping dog. The rings of sausage speak for themselves but what of the buzzing flies the smell of stopped blood? Only the flies have found their way here. More soundless than the hum of the neon signs above each stall. The grey meat is in a cooler or frozen hidden in back rooms, or between bleached slices of bread or battered in crispy red and brown.

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But even here at the mall amongst the streaky mirrors, brown brick, the false ivy and fluorescent light. Amongst the shop girls sporting their wares eating the red lipstick from their lips. Surely even here meaning is lurking, hidden. What of the desire in all the soft glazed eyes. Desire for meaning. Another posture. For the light to reach them through an open window. For their immaculate re-construction.

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Poses of Statuary

I was Galatea then. Trying to re-make myself trying to separate who i was from all the forces that had breathed life into me. And wanting, too, to understand my roots to feel my body as soft marble or cool hard ivory. To imagine myself as ruins first my nose knocked off, then head, arms. I was Galatea and my life had begun quietly, still. I was Galatea then, when i had no words to hold in my arms and i knew what Leonardo da Vinci had said: they do not throng from many provinces to the foot of the poem telling of gods but to the deity in paint or stone they flock leaving lilies and orchids, shells, smooth pebbles, tiny birds, kid goats.

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And so i found myself. Driving a cerulean blue 1969 Cougar 351 Cleveland under the hood to the gym in the basement of the tv rental store. Meeting the earth at strange angles defying gravity pressing the mass of half an ox with my thighs raising the equivalent of two crates of live chickens over my head pulling down behind my neck the weight of a Shetland pony. And high on fatigue, i would think, this is art. I drank raw eggs, shaved the hair from my pale, pale arms. Polished skin with lemon pledge. Struck poses of statuary in lonely gardens waited for chickadees to alight on my biceps, deltoids. Waited for bucks to canter out of trees scrape with their moss covered antlers at my legs like mountains. I waited for the flowers and rock candy the photographer. In front of mirrors i would close one eye hold my thumb up to my reflection make my body disappear.

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I was Galatea then. Strong and breakable. I didn't feel so much the weight of the body as the burden of finding something to carry.

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Out of the Sumptuous Chaos

Don't be captivated by the postcard view its long exposure of white light, its fish eye. In the inexorable lazy jaws of this city tonight a woman looks out the kitchen window of her third story walk-up the view a gigantic billboard a waif in leather and false lashes advertises downtown shopping. On the other side - a plate of deep fried chicken delivered to your door in minutes. She stands by the fridge an abundance of carrot sticks and cottage cheese in its belly. She stands there consuming a box of chocolates loving her body in the time it takes to chew, swallow. A couple stands in line at the grocery store flipping through magazines how to be a muscle head, a clothes horse, a culinary whiz, a slimmer body, a person of impeccable taste concerning chesterfields and window treatments. They stand there and their boxes and cans conveyed into plastic bags become monumental become so much more than they can carry. 78

A man watching television gets up, puts on an old coat, drives to a burger joint sits in a plastic chair. Insipid cheeseburger in hand he looks at a better representation of what he chews on the tray's paper mat. He imagines finding human teeth or traces of red silk, chunks of sawdust in the meat the way he once thought of razor blades in apples at Halloween. But look, look here before you now a feast of proportions hitherto unknown. Take up this plate made of hubcaps and Frisbees and gold. Do not scorn its origins or scoff at its kitsch. Admire the continuity of shape, its adaptability. Then step up to this banquet table fill your plates to heaping out of the sumptuous chaos and eat while you serve. Think not that ambrosia is merely marshmallows, whipped cream. Know the history of what you feast upon that lobsters were once fed to swine. Know the origin of the silver jewel-studded goblet you drink from the variety of these purple and red grapes.

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Eat copiously of this bread imagining the future of bread and all the grains of the loaves that will rise there in the morning sun. Imagine the spawning cycle, the pulsing red river when you spear flakes of smoked salmon with toothpicks. If your chicken bone has no meat throw it to the floor with all the fruit pits. If the morsel you choose is flavourless baste it with juices or caress it with spice and sauces. Conduct delicate operations with knife and fork. Dissect oranges with your fingernails the tip of your tongue. Eat apples until your gums bleed from breaking skin. Eat gorgeously with your asymmetrical heart like lions.

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Into the Kitchens of the Burning City We are dangerous at breakfast, at breakfast we investigate the reasons for our myths viciously ... - Gwendolyn MacEwen

Late at night over the phone i paint this picture relate this myth to a friend. A woman prepares to set sail on an epic journey a journey into the kitchens of the burning city into the devouring flames. She is girded in standard issue body hugging armour constructed of fashion magazine covers delicately welded together. Faces punched out from behind exist three-dimensionally. On the shield is her own face computer altered, enhanced. Her neck slender, elongated, swan-like. She recognises only her eyes - one blue, one green. This one small imperfection overlooked. She has the shield and the brittle bone whistle swinging from around her neck. But her only weapon this ridiculous clumsy sort of beauty.

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She doesn't know if she will ever reach home has not yet set foot on the ship's slippery, heaving deck though she sees it clearly from where she stands sherry-white sails billowing on the horizon. For this first leg of the journey reveals the armour is no protection is instead the thing she fights, stomach empty, teeth bared, sharp and ravenous. On the shore she begins to slough the skin without any miracle product, without strategy, without self-consciousness. She is not as pretty as a picture scraping and peeling away layers of plaster and gloss and shellac as though she were a roll of butterscotch lifesavers. Her skin below is pink, raw, shrivelled. But she is restored in the sun drinking glasses of water and lemonade and champagne. Drinking until her stomach speaks drinking until it gurgles arcane prophecy.

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Then she begins work on the shield. Her tools are delicate punches, small, perfectly balanced hammers, gold-handled chisels, the finest files. She works until all that remains are the narrowed eyes. Made so by some voluptuous truth that explodes all the angular truths into strange boxes that want no packing, no self-address. / tell the story - it takes all night and then invite my friend for breakfast. Tongues of mythical beasts on seven grain bagels with cream cheese. So together we too may eat and become dangerous and cry out for more spitting coffee through our teeth collapsing cake boxes and even heart-shaped chocolate boxes with our eyes bigger than our stomachs.

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The World, Green and Disarming Once there was a painter, Zeuxis. The painter rendered grapes so faithfully the gnarled vine, the glazed violet so bewitchingly, small birds would hover heavy with desire, their wings invisible and nip and peck at them. Once there was a painter, Zeuxis. In a contest with Parrhasius following the usual performance of tiny beaks, much flapping and flutter with aplomb Zeuxis dared his rival to withdraw a painted drapery. Oh, but these same pictures wouldn't find quite so many pretty pigeons today. And yet we know we are all of us pigeons. I propose that we tell each other stories chock full of anachronisms and mythical beasts long into the starless night changing the colour of grapes, names of characters so that we may recognize them in any guise.

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I propose that we meet at the Prado in Madrid below The Sense of Vision by Jan Brueghel the Elder. And that we gape and gaze at the objects the Roman busts, Persian carpets, telescopes, astrolabes, and the stacks of paintings. And also, at the view of the world, green and disarming through immense colonnades. That we look until we disgust ourselves with wanting. And that we stare also at the disrobed woman Consumption until we are, like her, greedy, and yearn not for possession but for vision itself. And then shall we re-name her Vision.

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Next, i propose we breeze like thieves into the long hall, the brimming picture gallery, its walls Venetian red, the crown moulding elaborate, the work of forgotten spies. That we enter as though we were steel-grey carrier pigeons imagining the imagination to be limitless, unconfined. Once inside the hall, finally there, inside let's begin with the assumption we are all of us blind there is one eye to share among us. When the eye is passed from one to the next we shall fill the blind spot with warbling with words, stories that far exceed our vocabularies glimpses of all the things we have seen that once patched together form one sublime and endless bulging poem reaching out beyond the close of the century. I propose we meet wondrous, unafraid below pictures with words one eye to share among us our hands cupped.

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THE A R T E M I S I A GENTILESCHI

POEMS

You will find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman. - Artemisia Gentileschi

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Fringes of Plot

Though none have been identified, Artemisia Gentileschi was said to have painted still lifes of fruit.

Painting was my heart's first language. I painted before ever reading or writing thought in pictures before speaking. The knowledge carried inside the body in the mind becomes colour, form, shadow and light. Becomes pictures that can never completely be expressed in words. The way that a dream re-told flattens. The translator's nightmare, this moment trying to coax gold into platinum, platinum into gold each changing from solid to liquid but refusing to shift from one pot on the fire to the next. I have painted still lifes of fruit left them unsigned, addressed to another century when i needed secrets kept quietly. When i needed to know the facts of my life wouldn't cloud the pictures or gather like dust in the places graced with light.

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I have painted a woven basket of fruit on a low table. This is the silent part of narrative. Glowing grapes and halved pears shadows originating from outside the frame someone lurking, listening just beyond. I have painted grapes on the bureau beside Holoferne's bed. The basket that once concealed Cleopatra's asp. The smell of strawberries, the taste of them. Speaking to the sixth sense through the other five. I have painted shrivelling lemons, shrinking plums signs of a language, figures of speech as though they are the most wondrous lemon, most ravishing plum. I revealed beauty where i could at the fringes of plot made it essential to narrative made silence essential, plausible, complicated where some would see it as incidental.

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I have painted fruit meaning fruitfulness, fecundity. Meaning i have borne things i could not bear. Meaning knowledge. Meaning all these must be eaten before spoiling saved in this way bruised apple, gashed pear, peeled orange gasping, dry. The rind casually off to the side. This is violence, pain in the same room with beauty. Some would see the fruit as bodies ripe for picking. It is fruit for sharing to hold under the tongue, melting. Sweet, bitter. At times i have painted flowers where figs should be and let the clever Dukes, most serene gentlemen, guess why and fear to ask.

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What a Woman Can Do And I will show your most illustrious Lordship what a woman can do ... - Artemisia Gentileschi

I was more ears than eyes alone in the studio at night touching up my paintings by candle light. Sometimes i would close my eyes and sing soprano. Feeling the darkness as Judith must have in Holofernes' tent - unsure of who lurked outside. As an unexpected ally - an enemy turned friend. And i felt there my namesake, Artemis, too. The moon outside the small open window. Painting in the light of day, i would think i will show them what a woman can do. And i stole from Michelangelo and from Caravaggio. I went where they had gone and where they could not go. I painted my heart, my Judiths horrifyingly beautiful. Judith and Abra conspiratorial, harmony and melody. The blood from Holofernes' neck soaking the white sheets. The blood was my blood and i painted it carefully. I called the viewer into the picture with folds of fabric that would make another painter weep and then i stuck them with a scimitar. Like Judith, i was not unwilling 93

to use beauty for a larger cause. Even when the other side was astounding ugly. Like Diana, Artemis, i am interested in change. Though, where she would turn a man into a stag have him chased by his own thirsty hounds i would change his mind if only for an instant the time it takes for eyes to speak to the belly's deep chambers. What i do is not revenge but a kind of forced gift giving. Dangerous to give. Fear once removed. This visceral understanding. Of the simplicity of violence, the terrifying dullness of it. How it is to be undone. I also painted my Judiths for the chance tired maidservant in a ducal palace who stands before my picture late at night by the glow of a single flame. Knowing she belongs there, wide-eyed. And also what it means to be caught, looking. I have given her a part in the story, this continuous narrative. I gave her Abra, shrewd, intelligent, radiant. And she is capable. This goes without saying. I would have given her more but for the risk. I would give her so much more.

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Instead, i left signs. Saying this is deliberate. This is a secret meeting place under which bodies may come and go. On the pommel of one Judith's sword there is the head of Medusa not missing, but without her snakes for hair. And on another's wrists a bracelet on each charm, a figure of Artemis. And in one picture she is dressed in Artemisian gold as it is called now her left hand shields the candle flame the moon appears in her face. Here i have stolen from my laughing friend dear Galileo who is not in the least bit mad and who believes that all the important stories collide are completely without gravity and he would climb the tower of Pisa, puffing to drop several of them off the top to prove this. From his exquisite drawings of the moon's phases i have stolen the shadow on Judith's face painted the moon of the huntress with my naked eye.

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A World Without Glass Judith again, i would say. She came to me often in waking dreams i never turned her away. When she first came to speak to me i had been shattered by la donna Tuzia. Tuzia - family friend, neighbour. So simply described it is unnecessary. I knew i would never again have a true friend. When she held me in the palm of her hand dropped me on the floor, left me did she not guess i would take up the straw broom sweep myself into a blue glass dish. It was not so much the dropping as the leaving. I was alone with feelings of yellow and red. Somewhere below all this who would have anticipated blue? A woman is not a vessel. This is only a picture in the mind can be mended, paint over paint. If this is true i also knew what it was to flow a surging river, the Nile.

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To paint this particular Judith, her dress i needed the colour of a pure and bottomless lake such as i have only heard described. One and one half ounces of ultramarine blue pigment. Molto caro. The most expensive colour. To purchase it i put up for collateral precious and strange objects from my household. Glass goblets with gold and jewelled bases. Bowls of glass supported by silver arms like tree branches. Coloured glass vases blown by a man laughing. The sort of breakables a mother gives her daughter. During this time, painting warp and weft, crease and fold i imagined a world without glass. Invulnerable. Aqueous. I imagined all the shades of blue. Unrestrained. Still. Glass can hold flowers and water and light. To hold that up, to look through such glass is to study another possibility. And anyway a world without glass is not necessary so long as i can imagine it.

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Cooked Water Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? • Virginia Woolf

My paintbrush was often betrayed by knife, fork and spoon, the empty dish. Waiting for payment it seemed i was always waiting, always hungry. I was forever almost bankrupt owing on a bumbling assortment of things. There was the high cost of models. I would write his most serene highness, illustrious lord explaining there are many kinds of beauty. While some would hire three models to paint nine women i could not cut such corners. And besides, surprisingly, these women eat too. There was my first daughter's wedding. This sorely taxed me, broke me yet again. And good or bad i didn't know whether my husband was living or not. Either way, i couldn't pinch him not even for the sake of Palmira who wouldn't think of it.

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And what do i paint with - brushes need to be replaced. Always i needed more pigment, more canvas. Money for props. Drapery, bed linen. Fine dresses, hair ornaments. Could i use the same sword over and over? If all these expenses weren't enough i would execute a drawing for approval to find an inferior artist was commissioned to fill it in. His work but a trifle and mine unrewarded. Or i would send my finest canvas at a pre-arranged price and be insulted with less. If i were a man would such nerve be shown? Bah. And what was it to my patron to take a minute away from his royal pursuits his dogs and horses to dip his hand into his royal chest. I went through winters without proper gloves, slippers. I would paint, sickly until the brush became a bloodless limb in my hand. For supper i would dine on the soup the Tuscans call cooked water. Or on bread soup - tomato, onion, celery boiled in water and ladled over stale toast. I have turned older than old potatoes into gnocchi made a sauce from borrowed runt tomatoes, wincing garlic. I have parcelled this out over long stretches. 99

And then there were the meals i designed late at night in bed, awake from hunger. Thick pheasant soup. Followed by crostini, stuffed eggs. Seafood risotto. Then plates of grilled cardoons, roasted artichokes, stuffed pigeons, baked trout drizzled with lemon. A pot of wild boar stew. Eggplant and zucchini. A salad made of chicory, mild lettuce, radicchio, mint and grated lemon rind. And afterwards, espresso with sugar and honey cake, almond biscotti, bomboloni. I would taste this meal in my thoughts and then sleep dreaming of all the blank canvas in Italy.

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Perspective

He was simply a man. Agostino Tassi. Hired by my father to teach me perspective. When he raped me he was a rank smelling trained bear green and orange striped flounce around his neck paws in the air performing his sole trick sluggish, sad. Afterwards, my quart of blood menstrual and virginal mingling on the white linen soaking into the mattress. What could i do but clean it up? I soaked the sheet in a bucket of vinegar and water. Watched the blood escape, pull away from the fabric. I looked at the red cloud in the water and wondered how i could paint that.

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I let him into my room again when i thought he would marry me. He never transformed into river mist, scudding clouds, a gentle rain shower or a tangerine flame. He was never a clean, titanium white swan. Always the ugly bear walking in on hind legs later, the sound from deep within the throat, the glass eyes, dropped jaw. The smell of sour blueberries on his breath his purple bee-stung, bramble-bit lips. The basket of blueberries he would bring on the chest of drawers which i refused, made him take away lest they seem to be in payment for favours. The event became larger than my work, than me. Yet it made me choose what shape i would take. lo became a pretty blonde heifer Callisto a small brown sharp-toothed bear. Goddesses willing, i was able to meld two shapes woman and artist.

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Shade Garden of Your Bones When my eyes changed to broken glass and i could only see a coin's breadth of the canvas at a time i turned it on its side, then upside down or looked at it in mirrors my back to it. There are moments in a life that slip away from sight like a painting does the weeks and days you are so close your eyelashes come away coloured. When it is sold and gone it flashes before your eyes even years later when you are studying pastries in a shop or tapping melanzane at the market. *

There are moments that live brightly in the buttery glow and shade garden of your bones sink back into earth only long after the flesh has decayed.

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At times it is convenient to look back at your life and imagine it gathered around a single incident. Convenient but of course a little like looking through broken glass. *

For me, it was not the rape itself which leaves its trace on the body the way espresso stains white linen and on the heart which is soft and spongy and forgets for me, it was not even the seven months trial but the sibille the cords twisted around and through my fingers tighter and tighter. My mother, her dear spirit, above me in an ecstasy of clouds saying your fingers, poor fingers, poor girl mine, not your fingers. My own lips spoke it is true, it is true, it is true.

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When Tassi who had his first wife murdered and was married again whose fingers meant nothing was believed and i was tortured asked did this man deflower you i knew like light erupting through pink clouds on a Carracci ceiling fresco that things would be different for me because i was a woman. Always whore or temptress or fallen woman. Flower. That was the moment that seeped into my bones. *

A life can be imagined as having one central moment, one central utterance. We know a life more like the moon persistent, speaking its phases as proof it is more than one round howl having an impossible number of craters to map and name and a secret side which i sometimes fancy as a large grove of citrus trees orange and yellow, verdant.

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*

Before this moment were the years i worked in my father Orazio's studio i was a fish made of water but i could become a wall of loose stones or a speckled bird in a window frame. Before, there were all the paintings i studied in Rome's churches the candles i lit, the crosses i drew across my chest with holy water. Before this i knew i would live elaborately with great precision, exuberance. My life following the lines of a swirling Bernini concoction. My paintings full to excess, their frames straining. Afterwards, i painted cut flowers as though they were rooted in a field. Afterwards, i carried in my apron the bone-handled knife i threw at him pulling up his trousers. Afterwards, my bill for black pigment rose. Afterwards, i painted with martyred fingers. *

During the sibille, the truth torture their names entered my head.

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Lucretia, Cleopatra, Corsica, Bathsheba, Galatea, Lot's daughters, Potiphar's wife, Jael, Clio, Esther, St. Catherine, Minerva, Mary Magdalen, Madonna, Artemis, Andromeda, Aurora, Persephone, Venus, Susanna, Judith. They massaged my fingers loosened the cords comforted me with a flood of well-muscled stories that folded up like poppies in the cool of the night petals like peeled sunburn around the hard black seeds in the centre. Following the words it is true, it is true, it is true i began a long conversation with these women interrupted by a marriage and the arrival of two wise daughters. Then Pietro faded away for which i came to love him and which made me wish i had room for him after all in the crowd that hummed like the streets of Naples the sound of honey-bees the perfect weight of them hanging from tiny yellow blossoms. 107

Emerald, Amethyst, Opal Cesare Ripa writes a book says the allegory of painting is a gagged woman. She is wearing this, her hair like so, her eyebrows thus. Even dictates what she paints. Ripa says paint her so and they do. Yes, let painting be a woman. Let her be me. I look at my reflection in a mirror which reflects me in another. Painting is a woman straining to see, to know. I throw my whole body into this precarious, off-balance. Painting is a woman caught staring into her soul. I see the spirit of Caesar there. In sturdy shoes and a canvas smock over a shimmering emerald green dress that becomes amethyst, opal in the light. My hair is of no consequence tangled, unruly, wild. Were there garlands they would lie forgotten on the studio floor trampled into pink dust. 109

The blank ochre-primed canvas is land after a long voyage on the Tyrrhenian sea. I raise the paintbrush in my ochre-stained hand forearm strong. I could row from Naples to Rome. The allegory of painting paints. Alone, absorbed, thinking. Her viewer, herself.

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Notes to the Poems Rachel Ruysch was apprenticed at the age of fifteen to a Dutch flower painter, and was producing signed work by eighteen. In 1693, sne married a portrait painter and together they had ten children. Paula Modersohn-Becker, the German expressionist painter, met Otto Modersohn at the Worpswede painters' colony in 1897. After their marriage in 1901, Paula would be constantly torn between her duties as a wife and her devotion to her art. She traveled alone to Paris four times, to study art and to paint - on one visit encountering the recently discovered mummy portraits from Fayum. On the last trip, Paula intended to break with Otto and abandon Worpswede, but did in fact return. The following spring Paula was expecting a child. She died of an embolism at the age of 31, eighteen days after giving birth to a daughter. Rosa Bonheur attracted much attention by wearing trousers, keeping short hair and smoking cigarettes. She lived with Nathalie Micas until Nathalie's death in 1889, and then with Anna Klumpke at a chateau near the Fountainebleau Forest in France, where she kept an array of animals, including her pet lioness, Fathma. "The Pink Undertones" refers to Marie de'Medici, Queen of France, Landing in Marseilles from the Marie de'Medici cycle by Peter Paul Rubens.

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"The Drapes Floating all Around Me." There is a legend that the model for Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin was a drowned prostitute pulled out of the Tiber in Rome. "Take It Back: An Ode to Shrimp Woman" is in response to Ingres' Grande Odalisque "A Thousand Words." Giuseppe Arcimboldo joined the Viennese court in 1562, under the successive patronage of the Emperors Ferdinand, Maximilian and Rudolph II. He is known for his paintings of composite heads - figures made up of thematic assortments of flora, fauna, and other objects. "Dead Skin Dust." The woman who worked on the restoration of da Vinci's The Last Supper was Pinin Brambilla Barcilon. "Even Venus had to Learn to Love her Face." Mary Richardson was the woman who vandalized the Rokeby Venus. "The World, Green and Disarming." The story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius is recounted in Pliny's Natural History. Artemisia Gentileschi. In 1612, Agostino Tassi, a painter, stood trial for raping Artemisia. During the trial, Tuzia, Artemisia's supposed guardian and friend, claimed that Artemisia's behavior was openly sexual, while Artemisia testified that Tuzia allowed Tassi access to her. Tassi was presumably convicted though the records of the sentence haven't been found; he was released shortly after the seven month long trial ended. A month after the trial, Artemisia married an artist Pietro Stiattesi. in

Acknowledgments Some of these poems have appeared in the following journals: The Amethyst Review, blue buffalo, BorderCrossings, Event, The fiddlehead, Grain, TickleAce, Whetstone. The Artemisia Gentileschi poems were broadcast on CBC's Alberta Anthology. This book was written with the support of a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. I am grateful to the women in my writing group who read and commented on these poems - Noreen Bell, Brea Burton, Lee Elliott, Rebecca Luce-Kapler, April Miller and Erin Ward. Thanks also to Heather Carnahan, Meli Costopoulos, Olga Costopoulos and Annette Schouten Woudstra. A special thank you to Bert Almon for his early encouragement, faith and friendship. Many thanks to my editor, Nathalie Cooke. Thanks and love to Rob, my first reader, for his fine eyes.

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List of Illustrations Page 12 Rachel Ruysch (Dutch, 1664-1750). Flowers in a Vase, n.d., Oil on canvas, i83/4 x i$3A in. The National Museum of Women in the Arts. Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. i6 Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait, 1906. Oil on canvas, 61 x 50 cm. Oeffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kunstmuseum. (Photo: Oeffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Martin Buhler). 24 Rosa Bonheur (182.2-1899). The Horse Fair. Oil on canvas, 2.44.5 x 5°6-7 cm- The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887. 30 Caravaggio. Death of the Virgin, c. 1605-06. 369 x 245 cm. Paris, Louvre. 36 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). La Grande Odalisque. Paris, Louvre. 3# Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Summer. Paris, Louvre. 46 Diego Velazquez. Rokeby Venus. London, National Gallery. 52 Johannes Vermeer. Woman Reading a Letter. 46.5 x 39 cm. Rijksmuseum-Stichting, Amsterdam.

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Page 72 Pieter Aertsen. Butcher's Stall. Uppsala University, Sweden. 92

Artemisia Gentileschi. Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, . c. 162,5. Oil on canvas, 72, 1/5 x 55^". The Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Leslie H. Green.

108 Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1651/3). Self-Portrait as La Pittura. Royal Collection Enterprises. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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