Selections from Somatic: the Life and Work of Egon Schiele, by Catherine Owen, 1998

Self-Portrait Pulling Down an Eyelid, by Egon Schiele (Austria) 1910

Muse
 
Every figure you sketched
was your father’s.
The impulse which strode him
vigorous
to the local brothel on his wedding night
because your mother was seventeen
and scared.
And the way he returned
after an encounter with Madame M,
the syphilis riding him as a wood worm
straddles the first timber of a new home.
His early progeny was stillborn,
the rest scarred by a disease
which urged him to dress for invisible guests.
Every figure you sketched
possessed his gauntness:
bodies in which light struggles,
faces taunted by the sex
death brings.
 
 
**
 
Blind Mother, 1910
 
She has borne twins,
one for each sightless eye.
 
Their bald heads fold over
her breasts; their suckle is sightless
 
as though light has made them insatiable.
She kneels, martyred to their mouths,
 
a mother nursing around walls,
her thin canes of milk letting down
 
into throats, red streets she must touch,
nourish with her blindness.
 
**
 
Seated Male Nude, 1910
 
knees are the gargoyles of his body,
carved from an edifice of bone
they glare down at the landscape
calves and feet form.
 
thighs spring like sinew bridges,
intersecting roads, muscled hillocks,
all connecting to the pubis:
one-industry town.
 
the stomach is always snow covered;
one child, navel-size, prepares to slide
down the well-worn path which divides
east and west of this steepest climb.
 
hips jut like plateaus,
catch-alls for what may fall
down the runnel of the body
and settle.
 
ribs are farmlands
where martyrs plant
rows of rock and skin, seeded
by lungs.
 
nipples are secret landmarks
where settlers drink, draw round
red pleasures on the table tops
at sundown.
 
his sex lurks, soft outcast, in this city of bone.
 
**
 
Vision
 
Your surname provoked
jibes from critics
who imagined a correlation
between “schielen- to squint”
 
and the way you painted women
with all their knobby beauty:
chafed knuckles, rude elbows,
crude lips with lust in all the fissures.
 
Yes, you had a bent
towards depiction of a particular kind
but your lids never pressed narrow
in refusal. In some self-portraits, you
 
deigned to answer them by pulling
an eye open with one finger so
the white widened in exaggerated 
defiance. It was as though
 
you were parting the folds of a woman,
for one purpose, gentle yet persistent:
to take the darkness and draw
it ever deeper.
 
**
 
Mr. Death
 
Having once heard the dirge of syphilis sung over his
father’s body, Egon depicted Death as a mirror image, rarely a
skeletal cliché, or the curvaceous stylization common to Klimt.
This Death, though paler than the average man, retains his
features: a receding hairline, layers of garments over the bone
dance. The victims are always in close proximity, gripped or
dragged, the shadow of knowledge cast irrevocably between
their eyelids upon jaundiced complexions.
And Death is never a woman. He is the male urge grown
cannibal. The man who, by visiting a brothel, brings about his
own downfall. A scourged likeness of the libido. The victims
have no vision of a shapely afterlife; their names are beaten
dimensionless by gossips.
 
**
 
Dead Mother, 1910
 
The hand passes by like the ship
in Breughel’s Icarus, a fish fossilized
in the drift of black waters. It is not gilded,
but passes, unconcerned with the dying.
 
*
In the chrysalis of an impotent butterfly,
bound child. It is warm with the distortion 
of binding; a faint yolk glow emanates.
The tiny whites of eyes leak. One hand
like a prophet crab pushes at the shawl.
Stands to speak.
 
*
 
The jaundiced sinew of a woman drifts in.
She rests on the embankment of her child.
One moon passes and the tide returns,
gathers her in again, womb after womb.
 
*
 
The sightless night turns, imitates.
 
**
 
Witness
 
St. Dorothy, the martyr
from Cappadocia, was asked
by a doubter to send fruits
from heaven after her execution
to prove the worth of her belief.
 
Not long after, an angel appeared
bearing a trinity of apples, unfurrowed
by rot, roses blooming without fade.
You, who knew how society aches
to use the quivers of hatred and diminishment,
 
took St. Sebastian as your patron,
depicted yourself torn by his fate:
arrows ciphering your heart, cancelling its fury.
No one had to ask, at your death,
for proof of your faith, words existed already
 
proclaiming, I am the fruit. And eyes, dipping
to the apples, the petals pollinate them endlessly.
 
Catherine Owen
 
“Blind Mother” first appeared in Descant Journal. These poems are all from the book Somatic: the Life and Work of Egon Schiele (Catherine Owen, Exile Editions, 1998.)
 
Catherine Owen is the author of sixteen collections of poetry and prose. Somatic is her first book, written when she was 23-25. A born and raised Vancouverite, she now lives in Edmonton in a 1905 house called Delilah. Her most recent book is 2024's The Weather Says: poems, a limited edition collection from Carbonation Press in Spokane, Washington.

Dead Mother, by Egon Schiele (Austria) 1910