#ekphrasis

Then the erotic charge turned off like a light switch. I think the last fire got peed on in that hotel outside Lansing. Peed on and sizzled and then a welcome and lasting silence.

Then my eyes got hungry. They looked at bowls and barn owls and paper clips, panoramic lavender fields and a single purple spear,

and it was good but not good enough. My eyes were hungry for paint, like I used to imagine a horse could taste the green in its mouth

before its lips found the grass. Then I woke to the words “still life,” not as the after-image of a dream but as the body wakes and knows it needs

mince pie before the mind has come to claim it. I craved paint like the pregnant body craves pomegranates or hasenpfeffer or that sauerbraten made with gingersnaps.

Van Gogh ate paint. At least that’s the myth of van Gogh. I ate van Gogh, the still lifes of old boots and thick-tongued irises. Then my eyes followed the trail back, to Dürer

and his plump rabbit, as perfectly composed as a real one, as if he’d invented rabbits, and Chardin’s dead hare strung up in a brownish-gold space, its head and ears

flopped onto what appears to be a table, the ears made of rough bands of white and black and gray and green-brown paint, the whiskers painted in, the tufts

of fur articulated with white gestures from a thin brush. And the vanitas paintings of skulls and unspent coins, and Baugin’s dessert wafers shaped like little flutes,

and Pieter Aertsen’s Butcher’s Stall with the Flight into Egypt in which a small rendering of the Holy Family is relegated to the background

while the foreground is loaded with gaudy carnage, a vat of lard, a pig’s head hung by the snout, cascades of sausages, strangled hens, and yawning sides of beef.

The huge gory head of a cow is front and center, directly below the cool blues of the miniature Virgin Mary handing out alms to the poor. The cow’s cold nose

is so close it makes my eyes water. Its watery eye gazes back at me and I fall in love. I fall in love again.

An ekphrasis; original painting beneath the cut.

the moment God turns away, the pin feathers break the skin. a flourish of florescence emerges unstained by mortality, awash in the radiance of a newborn star, as golden as her tresses, she is unbound worthiness troubles her so, of knowing she is undeserving. her mortal anchor sheds with her humanity to the earth, her eyes fix not unto Heaven but to her, to the feathers, sprouting free

11 AM by Edward Hopper

She’s awake now, sitting on something that might not support her much longer. It would only take the whisper of a voice behind the curtain for the entire scaffolding of her perfumed sensitivity to collapse and crush her. For now, she remains seated, and it’s easy to sit; it’s almost the only thing she still knows how to do, because the night stripped her of all her belongings and handed her over to the morning like a wave abandons a jellyfish on the beach: pale, naked, almost transparent. The hustle and bustle of the street slips past the window, and she exists simultaneously ancient and ready for a new beginning. Sought by no one and found by no one, she sits on the edge of the room and on the edge of the morning as if on an underwater island that had grown within time.

But this post is not written in Kerouac’s free form style. It’s more Homeric, but in no way epic. More like Cheever’s concise story when a superficially confident and seemingly successful upper-middle-class suburbanite has his bubble burst again and again as he makes his way “home” swimming pool by pool. That tone is set visually in a scene from a retelling of the parable “The Frog and the…