In this Poem, Writing About Cycladic Art Leads to the Election, by Deborah Gorlin

Cycladic Figurines, Cycladic female figurines of the widespread Spedos variety (22-23) and Dokathismata variety (24). Early Cycladic II, 2800-2300 BC, Keros-Syros group. Findings from Naxos and Amorgos. National Archaeological Museum of Athens, inv. no. 6140.21, 3913, 9096. photo by Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

In this Poem, Writing About Cycladic Art Leads to the Election

These Cycladic figures are so unlike, admit it,
those grotesque Venuses, whose sculptors 

invoked a chthonic gravitas, bloated 
and erupted the stone, to make of it 

a baroque nakedness, turbulently noduled, 
thickly thighed, hot-water-bottle breasted, 

the whole of her furled inward, capped acorn,
locked inside a fisted inscrutable darkness. 

She’s bowed downward, as if fixed by her uterus, 
the body growing inside her belly. And that’s all, folks.

Back then, I’d be scared to be a woman. No wonder 
we were worshipped. But several thousand years 

later, what a difference! Of ever fresh white marble, 
these figures, angular, slim and sleek, except 

for noses sharply denotated, dashes for eyes 
and mouth, white silhouettes, look Deco-like, 

would-be flappers, their v’s lightly incised, bellies 
just slightly rising, nothing tumid, arms folded 

above the waist, perhaps protective of their bodies 
before they became properties, or just sporting,

stream-lining women, like summery linen, 
tennis whites, strong white teeth. Don’t get me 

wrong-- I’m not arguing boyish bodies for women, 
or almost childlessness. Found in cemeteries, 

no one knows their meaning: doll, idol, talisman, 
mascot, underworld docent? I don’t really care.

Because I like their wholesome, confident
mystery. Now they steady me in this vast museum, 

rooms populous with art works and too many spectators. 
Alone in this gallery, off the beaten path, before the display 

cases I can contemplate, rest my eyes, to gaze 
at them as if sipping from a straw my refreshment, 

a lemonade in the heat, the great elemental 
simplicity and serenity of one I could easily clutch 

or carry in my bag, hold as a hand weight, as we use 
in Pilates, a tiny barbell of antiquity, my ideal model 

to build an anonymous lovely body, not some contested, 
identified whomever. To suck on her timeless lozenge,

to soothe my throat sore with too confused, 
querulous growling voices, to use her as a baton 

to conduct the divisive orchestra, and to carve
with an obsidian chisel once more the age-old 

rock of us, the equivalent of an Oscar statuette, 
except female, the award going to a woman to lead our nation. 

Deborah Gorlin

Read Deborah's work after the fascinating Isabella Blow:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/poems-about-isabella-blow-by-deborah-gorlin

Read Deborah's poem after Raymond Isidore:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/cover-story-by-deborah-gorlin

​Deborah Gorlin is the author of two previous books of poems, Bodily Course, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997, and Life of the Garment, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize.  Her new book of poems, Open Fire, Bauhan, was published in Spring, 2023. Recent poems have been published in Plume; On the Seawall; the Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; Rumors, Secrets & Lies; Swwim; and Yetzirah. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades” was a finalist in Calyx magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing.  Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.