Thrall

               

Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaeus;

or, The Mulata

                  After the painting by Diego Velásquez, c. 1619

                                                by Natasha Trethewey

She is the vessels on the table before her:

the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher

clutched in her hand, the black one edged in red

and upside-down. Bent over, she is the mortar,

and the pestle at rest in the mortar -- still angled

in its posture of use. She is the stack of bowls

and the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hung

by a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundled

in it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand.

She’s the stain on the wall the size of her shadow --

the color of blood, the shape of a thumb. She is echo

of Jesus at table, framed in the scene behind her:

his white corona, her white cap. Listening, she leans

into what she knows. Light falls on half her face.

 

Thrall

             Juan de Pareja, 1670

         He was not my father

though      he might have been

         I came to him

the mulatto son

                   of a slave woman

        just that

as if       it took only my mother

       to make me

                    a mulatto

meaning

                   any white man

could be my father

            *

In his shop     bound

       to the muller

I ground his colors

       my hands dusted     black

with fired bone     stained 

      blue     and flecked

with glass     my nails

edged vermilion     as if

     my fingertips bled

In this way     just as

     I'd turned the pages

of his books

    I meant to touch

          everything he did

          *

With Velásquez     in Rome

     a divination

At market     I lingered to touch

     the bright hulls of lemons

          closed by eyes until

    the scent was oil

and thinner     yellow ocher

    in my head

         And once

the sudden taste of iron

         a glimpse of red

   like a wound-opening

         the robes of the pope

a portrait

         that bright shade of blood

         before it darkens

purpling nearly to black

           *

Because he said

        painting was not

        labor     was

the province of free men

       I could only 

watch     Such beauty

      in the work of his hands

               his quick  strokes

     a divine language I learned

over his shoulder

               my own hands

tracing the air

     in his wake     Forbidden

              to answer in paint

I kept my canvases secret

              hidden until

     Velásquez decreed

              unto me

     myself     Free

I was apprentice     he

             my master still

         *

How intently at times

      could he fix his keen eye

              upon me

though only once

     did he fix me     in paint

my color a study

     my eyes wide

             as I faced him

a lace collar at my shoulders

     as though I'd been born

             noble

     the yoke of my birth

gone from my neck

     In his hand     a long brush

            to keep him far

     from the canvas

far from it     as I was

     the distance between us

           doubled     that

he could observe me

     twice     stand closer

           to what he made

For years     I looked to it

     as one looks into a mirror

     *

                  And so

  in The Calling of Saint Matthew

     I painted my own

likeness     a freeman

     in the House of Customs

           waiting to pay

my duty     In my hand

     an answer     a slip of paper

           my signature on it

     Juan de Pareja     1661

Velásquez     one year gone

     Behind me

            upright on a shelf

a forged platter     luminous

            as an aureole

     just beyond my head

            my face turned

to look out from the scene

     a self-portrait

To make it

           I looked at how

my master saw me     then

     I narrowed my eyes

     *

Now

     at the bright edge

of sleep     mother

She comes back to me

    as sound

           her voice

in the echo of birdcall

    a single syllable

           again

and again     my name

    Juan Juan Juan

or     a bit of song    that

          waking

I cannot grasp 

 

 Natasha Trethewey, Thrall: Poems. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

See also Blacks in Renaissance Painting.

Some days the sea

                          by Richard Blanco

The sea is never the same twice. Today

the waves open their lions-mouths hungry

for the shore and I feel the earth helpless.

Some days their foamy edges are lace

at my feet, the sea a sheet of green silk.

Sometimes the shore brings souvenirs

from a storm, I sift spoils of sea grass:

find a broken finger of coral, a torn fan,

examine a sponge's hollow throat, watch

a man-of-war die a sapphire in the sand.

Some days there's nothing but sand

quiet as snow, I walk, eyes on the wind

sometimes laden with silver tasting salt,

sometimes still as the sun. Some days

the sun is a dollop of honey and raining

light on the sea glinting diamond dust,

sometimes there are only clouds, clouds—

sometimes solid as continents drifting

across the sky, other times wispy, white

roses that swirl into tigers, into cathedrals,

into hands, and I remember some days

I'm still a boy on this beach, wanting

to catch a seagull, cup a tiny silver fish,

build a perfect sand castle. Some days I am

a teenager blind to death even as I watch

waves seep into nothingness. Most days

I'm a man tired of being a man, sleeping

in the care of dusk's slanted light, or a man

scared of being a man, seeing some god

in the moonlight streaming over the sea.

Some days I imagine myself walking

this shore with feet as worn as driftwood,

old and afraid of my body. Someday,

I suppose I'll return someplace like waves

trickling through the sand, back to sea

without any memory of being, but if

I could choose eternity, it would be here

aging with the moon, enduring in the space

between every grain of sand, in the cusp

of every wave, and every seashell's hollow.  

Richard Blanco is to read one of his poems at the Inauguration of President Obama tomorrow, 21 January.  For more of his on-line poetry, go to http://www.floatingwolfquarterly.com/6/richard-blanco/#0/contents,  and several other sites listed on his webpage here.

The Pale King

                     by David Foster Wallace

§ 1

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day.  A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys.  All nodding.  Electric sounds of insects at their business.  Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow.  insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and sxhist and chondrite iron scabs in granite.  Very old land. Looka round you.  The horizon trembling, shapeless.  We are all of us brothers.

       Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew.  An alfalfa breeze.  Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert.  Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. No Hunting. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak.  The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail.  Read these.

Lullaby

Lullaby

                  W.H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral:

But in my arms till break of day

Let the living creature lie,

Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:

To lovers as they lie upon

Her tolerant enchanted slope

In their ordinary swoon,

Grave the vision Venus sends

Of supernatural sympathy,

Universal love and hope;

While an abstract insight wakes

Among the glaciers and the rocks

The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity

On the stroke of midnight pass

Like vibrations of a bell

And fashionable madmen raise

Their pedantic boring cry:

Every farthing of the cost,

All the dreaded cards foretell,

Shall be paid, but from this night

Not a whisper, not a thought,

Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:

Let the winds of dawn that blow

Softly round your dreaming head

Such a day of welcome show

Eye and knocking heart may bless,

Find our mortal world enough;

Noons of dryness find you fed

By the involuntary powers,

Nights of insult let you pass

Watched by every human love.

Gallipoli

From: The War Correspondent 

                  by Ciaran Carson

1. Gallipoli

Take sheds and stalls from Billingsgate,
all glittering with scaling-knives and gutted fish,
and the tumbledown outhouses of English farmers’ yards
smelling of dung and straw and horses
cantering through the back lanes of Dublin;

take an Irish landlord’s ruinous estate,
elaborate pagodas from a Chinese Delftware dish
on which the fishes fly through shrouds and yards
of leaking ballast-laden junks bound for Benares
in search of bucket-loads of tea as black as tin;

take a dirty gutter from a back street in Boulogne,
where houses teeter so their pitched roofs meet,
chimneys tall as those in Sheffield
or Irish round towers,
smoking like a fleet of British ironclad destroyers;

take the oregano-scented arcades of Bologna,
spaghetti-twists of souks and smells of rotten meat,
labyrinthine as the rifle-factories of Springfield,
or the tenements deployed by bad employers
who sit in parlours doing business drinking Power’s;

then populate this slum with Cypriot and Turk,
Armenians and Arabs, British riflemen
and French Zouaves, camel-drivers, officers and sailors,
sappers, miners, Nubian slaves, Greek money-changers,
and interpreters who do not know the lingo;

dress them in turbans, shawls of fancy needlework,
fezzes, knickerbockers, sashes, shirts of fine Valenciennes,
boleros, pantaloons designed by jobbing tailors,
feathers of the ostrich and the pink flamingo,
and outfits even stranger;

set up some slaughterhouses for the troops,
and stalls with sherbert, lemonade and rancid lard for sale,
a temporary hospital or two, a jail,
a stagnant harbour redolent with cholera,
and open sewers running down the streets;

let the staple diet be green cantaloupes
swarming with flies, washed down with sour wine,
accompanied by the Byzantine
jangly music of the cithara
and the multi-lingual squawks of parakeets –

O landscape riddled with the diamond mines of Kimberley,
and all the oubliettes of Trebizond,
where opium-smokers doze among the Persian rugs,
and spies and whores in dim-lit snugs
discuss the failing prowess of the superpowers,

where prowling dogs sniff for the offal beyond
the melon stench of pulped plums and apricots,
from which is distilled the brandy they call “grape-shot”,
and soldiers lie dead or drunk among the crushed flowers –
I have not even begun to describe Gallipoli.

Pearl

                  

(14th century English)

Translated by Jane Draycott

                       I

One thing I know for certain: that she

was peerless, pearl who would have added

light to any prince's life

however bright with gold. None

could touch the way she shone

in any light, so smooth, so small --

she was a jewel above all others.

So pity me the day I lost her

in this garden where she fell

beneath the grass into the earth.

I stand bereft, struck to the heart

with love and loss. My spotless pearl.

I've gazed a hudred times at the place

she left me, grieving for that gift

which swept away all shadow, that face

which was the antidote to sorrow.

And though this watching sears my heart

and wrings the wires of sadness tighter,

still the song this silence sings me

is the sweetest I have heard --

the countless quiet hours in which

her pale face floats before me, mired

in mud and soil, a perfect jewel

spoiled, my spotless pearl.

In the place where such riches lie rotting

a cfarpet of spices will spring up and spread,

blossoms of blue and white and red

which fire in the full light facing the sun.

Where a pearl is planted deep in the dark

no fruit or flower could ever fade'

all grasscorn grows from dying grain

so new wheat can be carried home.

From goodness other goodness grows:

so beautiful a seed can't fail

to fruit or spices fail to flower

fed by a precious, spotless pear.

So I cam to this very same spot

in the green of an August garden, height

and heart of summer, at Lammas time

when corn is cut with curving scythes.

And I saw that the little hill where she fell

was a shaded place showered with spices:

pink gillyflower, ginger and purple gromwell,

powdered with peonies scattered like stars.

But more than their loveliness to the eye,

the sweetest fragrance seemed to float

in the air there also -- I knew beyond doubt

that's where she lay, my spotless pearl.

Caught in the chill grasp of grief I stood

in that place clasping my hands, seized

by the grip on my heart of longing and loss.

Though reason told me to be still

I mourned for my poor imprisoned pearl

with all the fury and force of a quarrel.

The comfort of Christ called out to me

but still I wrestled in wilful sorrow.

Then the power and perfume of those flowers

filled up my head and felled me, slipped me

into sudden sleep in the place

where she lay beneath me. My girl.

Eros and Psyche

by Jehanne Dubrow

after Antonio Canova’s sculpture (1787)

From a certain vantage point they

could be lovers—the man

with his arms encircling my

mother, and both of them gone

marble. He has woken her with

the sound of broken wings. Her

blanket is polished rock, cold

and weighted to the bed. From

this angle the knife is hidden,

although it’s there, the way

an arrow is always shooting through

this story, desire a dart that

finds the tender spot. Bodies

make a space for gods to

intervene. Tonight if there are

souls like butterflies, then they

have stilled. If beauty could be

bolted in a box, if a deity could

say, Don’t open this, then my

mother might stay asleep

forever, unbothered by the

monument of those hands.