The Glow of Frida Kahlo, by William Dow

The Glow of Frida Kahlo
​
(Palais Galliera, 15 October 2022)

It now seems so obvious how you lived inside yourself
with your polio dipped in smoke, your fallible body,
its chronic pain calling you forth, sometimes sneaking rest
in a wheelchair in your studio full of azul self-portraits.

Firmly your hands were folded standing in front of The Two
Fridas (23 October 1939), identical cartridges in a tray,
with their two hearts—one torn open, the other newly beating,
both outside of your body where an un-stanched artery,
as alive as what was inside your darting mind, put crimson
drops on the lap of your dress. Mexico hurt you into art.

“Detroit is a dump.” It seems everything enters your brown eyes.
Flowers move suspiciously on your pleated hem. Alone
in pain. 

Such pained starings from a shaken world, the three Fridas.
A pistol. A flask. You hold hands with yourself in a room
of stormy clouds on a back wall. Someone else sprinkles
pre-Columbian dust in the entryway and puts votive colours
on the floor. You take a breath as you go out.

And suddenly the room is perfumed,  
apart. Your body makes you laugh.
And that will not last long, either.

William Dow

William Dow is Emeritus Professor of American Literature at the Université Paris-Est (UPEM) and Emeritus Professor of English at The American University of Paris. He has published poems in The Berkeley Poetry Review, Sans Issue, The Adirondack Review, and other literary journals. He lives in Brittany and Paris.