Mona Lisa, by M. Ann Reed

Mona Lisa, by Leonardo Da Vinci (Italy) 1503-1506

Mona Lisa 

True, she wasn’t a shrew – couldn’t be broken-in like he tamed horses for a living – and there was no use bridling and hitching her to the plow – yet when he feels Leonardo resonate with her vibrantly watery secret-self – her vivaciousness always held in reserve – he absorbs every brush stroke – sending his every pore whirling through the grey-green poplar wood – she becoming the Princess, he becoming the Frog Prince her eyes had thrown against the wall – this time he’s penetrating tree rings – flying horizontally through thick darkening forest – perhaps where Dante began his dark night of the soul – yet more likely the forest where Oedipus had found the goodness within him – indeed he feels the prince within who begins to understand his feminine soul – mother, wife, daughter – no incest there – all guiding him toward their deep brown, now blending, penetrating eyes – hazelnut wombs from which he is newly born – his and her woody selfhoods trembling – everso slightly shaking from the artist’s hand through the brown of her dress to the brown of earth’s loam and distant aqueducts to her close-up thick dark chocolate hair to the far-off crowning green forest overhead – yes, they are unswerving lovers, yet tremoring from the inside the way poplars and quaking aspens’ heart-shaped leaves shiver – all holding earth’s loam in place – his loam now human becoming humane –  barely touching so very lightly the foreheads of his horses who meet his softened brown eyes with theirs and they know him, and he knows them – and they follow him always guiding him home to his soul-mate, his beloved who teaches him the dendritic river of reverie within them – the dendritic leaf patterns found in their hands and feet – their hearts’ flowing arteries, tributaries, veins – the circulatory system of their new – dare he say it – love – that new inner light turning his woodiness into suppleness – transforming him through her eyes  absorbing his evolving – he absorbing hers – as they wonder what this could mean beyond their fascination’s beholden-ness to nature – to one another – no longer touching – only the light from their eyes teaching them how beautiful they are – scattering seeds, planting trees, reorganizing cells until the shining pours out of their skin –  the eyes no longer reporting to the brain only – partners of the unspoken leap beyond themselves – forgetting themselves – in the rain – in how they are the thirst and the water – never desiring a way out of their rose    

M. Ann Reed

M. Ann Reed, a former International Baccalaureate and Cambridge overseas educator, is now a private international educator, exhibited Chinese calligrapher and brush painter, and author of essays and poems. Juried medical, psychology and literary journals remark her literary essays. Her co-authored book with Mabel S. Chu Tow, Strange Kindness, first published with University Press of America, is now curated by Rowman & Littlefield. Her poems published by various literary arts journals are now included in the chapbooks, making oxygen, FLP in 2020 and ekphrastics & eccentricities, Kelsay Books, July 2023.