Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beata Beatrix, by Markham Johnson

Beata Beatrix, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (UK) 1864

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beata Beatrix
                                                            
When the air clears and the moon
returns, it’s Beata Beatrix I recall though Rossetti’s
 
Pre-Raphaelite symbolism seems a little
smeary and sentimental for an Okie, 
 
on a back porch mulling obsession and half 
a can of Lone Star.  Tonight, I can imagine 
 
Rossetti's suffering: his Lizzie 
gone, how he buried a reef 
 
of new poems clutched in her pale fingers,
then, years later, empty and tired 
 
of scavenging the gray creeks
of his imagination for some great mudcat 
 
of a sonnet that didn’t want to be dragged 
out of its hollow log, he dug her up
 
at midnight from Christ’s Church 
Graveyard and found a fat worm
 
had bored a hole through each page. 
If this were Oaklawn Cemetery, where spectres 
 
of long dead Okies drag tired wings through 
calcified stone, the ghosts 
 
of my cousins and uncle would have raised 
their longnecks then laughed because 
 
in Oklahoma you’ve got to have a sense 
of humor to carry you past 
 
the grave.  After that, Rossetti kept painting
this one picture over and over: small 
  
details shifting, a white dove dipped 
in cadmium red, the light clearing, and even
 
Dante in the background looking up
as if to say what the hell?
 ​
Markham Johnson

Markham Johnson won the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod, and his first poetry collection was published by the University Press of Florida.  He has an MFA from Vermont College, and his poems have been published widely in magazines including Nine Mile, Coal Hill, and Library Journal.