Caravaggio
Eyes that drink in the world -- how the hip bone juts under Christ’s taut skin as body is lowered into tomb, how two disciples, faces harrowed by labour, by suffering, brace him and it’s awkward, the way it would be, their faces the ones he lives among in Rome, in the poorer quarters, faces of peasants in the hills where he was a child, with their black-rimmed nails, their grimy bare soles no one else will paint and that get him in trouble, as do the whores, he makes into Mary, with milk-heavy breasts and too much cleavage, though churchmen still buy -- off the record -- for private pleasure, and as he honours men’s working hands so their bared torsos, unscarred and white as Carrarra marble but also doe-eyed, juicy boys as angels, minstrels or sun-flushed Bacchus. He honours violence too, the burn of it, the pride in his body’s tinder -- a tavern insult flaring into brawl and daggers drawn, into blooded streets. That pimp, Tomassoni, stabbed and dead, he’s on the run now -- Naples, Sicily, Malta -- painting in small rooms, back streets, his images bleaker, shallows of light, on black-brown fields -- the dark of well-rotted dung, of what lived broken down -- bitumen, ivory black, burnt umber -- his subjects wedged in a thin plane between frame and void. As is his David, holding at arm’s length Goliath’s severed head, mouth hanging open, roar gone, right eye ajar, death-clouded, the left wide, its rage still lit — his own likeness, his own face, while David, beautiful, looks a bit turned off but mostly sad, as if he knows, like us, where this is heading -- toward one last canvas -- where St. Ursula eyes the arrow stuck like a strange insect in her breast. And Caravaggio, eyes filmed, blind even, tilts his face to a light he’s letting go. Only one painting ever signed, as if with his finger, in blood. Susannah Lawrence Susannah Lawrence lives in northwest Connecticut, the rocky part. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Nimrod, The Cortland Review, The MacGuffin, Poet Lore, The Comstock Review and Green Hills Literary Lantern. Her full length collection, Just Above the Bone, was published in 2016 by Antrim House Press.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies. Continuing here means you consent. Thank you. Join us: Facebook and Bluesky
February 2025
|