Stairway of Farewells by Leonard Kress

Stairway of Farewells, by Giacomo Balla (b. Italy), 1908.

Stairway of Farewells
 
They hesitate on the stairs,
all three women, poised as if to wave
back to the place where they came from, their descent
well underway.  One grips the rail
and smiles, as does another, stylish in red,
hem spilling into her past and future.
 
The third figure in this painting (by the not-yet-Futurist
Balla) sacked in black, winded from the stairs,
must lean against the wall.  Her face is red,
burning through her mourning.  She waves
her fitter cohorts on, prayerful that the rail
is there to guide her slow descent
 
down into the open air of her neighborhood, a descent
that led her through an oscillating vortex of future
loss that she no longer has the strength to rail
against.  The younger others smile and keep staring
back, though soon they’ll both be riding the wave,
veiled hats bobbing on the crest, down into the blood-red
 
depths.  It is, I suppose, the shyer one, the one in red
who won’t return, whose anticipated descent
will seem to the other abduction, and her arms will wave
like a ululating voice, unconvinced the future
will return her daughter.  The pause, then, on these stairs
seems calculated to derail
 
the story—all those perspective lines like rail-
road tracks that vanish in a distance.  We’ve already read
the ending time and again.  The ending that makes my stare
fix them in a gaze that will not halt descent,
and will not change a future
determined by the picture plane.  Only a New Wave
 
that submerges vanishing points, a wave
as twisted as the stairway with its serpentine rail,
will (as Balla was to later know) fix the future
in the present—innocent as the girl in red
who stretches out her visit into the long descent,
even when she takes, two at a time, the stairs.

Leonard Kress

Leonard Kress has published poetry and fiction in Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex, Thirteens, and Braids & Other Sestinas, and Walk Like Bo Diddley (to be released this fall.)  He teaches philosophy and religion at Owens College in Ohio and edits creative non-fiction for Artful Dodge.