Artemisia, by Hannah Larrabee

Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, by Artemisia Gentileschi (Italy) 1639

Artemisia
 
Note: an Italian Baroque painter, Artemisia is considered one of the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists.
 
I have taken the morning
to read about myself by reading
about Artemisia Gentileschi, 
and the graveyards of airplanes
in deserts, airplanes that still
try to take off with any semblance
of wind, and could Artemisia
have sold herself on talent alone?
yes absolutely yes but then talent 
is constrained in order to be 
whatever it is that turns the pages
of history, of commerce, a woman 
is banished in her own way, it is
unique to each of us, and I think
of her paintings in museum stillness
separated as they have been from 
her touch, four hundred years 
to think themselves over in the eyes
of strangers remarking about
the boldness of colour, the weight
of shadow, and Artemisia never saw
an airplane, at least not in the air, 
and since I have seen both: 
her paintings, the airplanes, does that 
make me someone who could explain
anything? No; you see, when I take
something in for the first time, 
I am an ancient single-celled thing, 
lust of senses, something of colour
or form, lapis lazuli or second wing, 
as Artemisia said, never has anyone 
found in my paintings a repetition
of invention, not even a single hand
and in finding nothing else to relate 
this to, I turn to memory, which 
isn’t a thing at all but like a painting 
witnesses me where I stand and I lift
a little from my shoes on that air, 
on that body.

Hannah Larrabee

Hannah Larrabee’s collection, Wonder Tissue, won the 2018 Airlie Press Poetry Prize and was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award. She has a new chapbook of epistolary poems to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin out from Nixes Mate Press. Hannah's written poetry for the James Webb Space Telescope program at NASA Goddard, and she'll be sailing around Svalbard in the Arctic Circle with artists and scientists in the fall of 2021. She reads for Bomb Cyclone, a journal of ecopoetics. hannahlarrabee.com