Читать книгу Purity of Absence - Dave Margoshes - Страница 21

Changed Title

The painting Whistler’s Mother was originally called Arrangement in Grey and Black Number One.

—Newspaper Item

Only a woman, a mother,

neither substance nor form

with the force or weight

of triangle and square

to anchor it to canvas and mind,

merely flesh, lacking

the permanence of parchment.

Yet surely there is

something of interest in this arrangement of colour and form beyond the obvious bow to the sentiment, the tug at the romantic forelock.

She sits in an arrangement

of bone and flesh that defies

the contortionist’s logic,

her lips composed in

a smile smeared with sex

beyond flesh and nerve, beyond

gender to the root of biology.

She has just said something,

waits listening for answers.

Her heart beats, blood flows,

the smell of her lifts itself off the canvas the way a fighter must before the bell, raising his head the way she does hers, into perfection.