Fresh Widow, by LaWanda Walters

Fresh Widow, by Marcel Duchamp (France) 1920

Fresh Widow
 
A widow at MOMA is a waltz.
In Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre
a window is dubbed “Fresh Widow,” ersatz
 
for the French window’s faux romance.
Rather than olive trees and the blue air,
and shined like shoes before a waltz,
 
the night air is simply black leather polished
daily by order of the artist. Eros
and c’est la vie were from the ersatz
 
name Rose Sélavy, the Dadaist’s
alter ego. The frame is blue for that air
we’d have liked. The window was a waltz
 
for Duchamp, who thought the pun obvious.
And at the grief group one woman did wear
a black leather coat, formal as a waltz,
 
zipped up. It looked like it came from Saks
Fifth Avenue. And did the old men ever leer,
there. You could say her jacket was ersatz
 
Duchamp. They’d planned it like artists,
the expensive resort. They had one perfect year.
They’d timed it like a waltz.
 
It appeared that the famous Dadaist
could sniff out art in the future,
too, each found thing serendipity, ersatz,
 
suitable for anything else. And how to resist
imagining the typist’s error?
Widows turn to windows and waltzes.
 
They’re sinister spiders and gullible sports,
the plump suspect a heroine, a whore.
Long since fresh, widows stand in, ersatz,
 
for punch lines in Hitchcock’s plots.
They fall for the murderer
who knows a widow’s just a waltz
 
in ¾ time. “The Merry Widow Waltz”
plays in the operetta
with the brand-new widow, sexy, ersatz.
 
The widow is useful. She’s a corset, a drink, the butt
of dirty jokes. When I was a widow, I didn’t care--
I would play the hobbyhorse, be the thumping waltz.
I was found out—fresh widow, ersatz.
 
LaWanda Walters
 
LaWanda Walters is a poet and painter who lives with her husband, fellow poet John Philip Drury, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine in Cincinnati. She is the author of a book of poems, Light Is the Odalisque (Press 53, Silver Concho Series, 2016), and has had poems recently published in Poetry and The Georgia Review.