​Visiting Goya’s Black Paintings in the Prado, by Louhi Pohjola

Saturn Devouring His Son, by Francisco de Goya (Spain) 1820-23

​Visiting Goya’s Black Paintings in the Prado
 
The couple pauses
before Witches Sabbath,
its hermeneutics inaccessible,
their brows bewildered.
She makes the sign of the cross.
Saturn Devouring One of his Children
is regarded by a hushed
family huddling together. 
The child closest to me whispers: 
why does the father eat his own?
Our docent leads the group before
Atropos, the three Fates shown
floating in air. We recoil
at their exceptional ugliness.
 
The room is dimly lit, the better
to taste revulsion, feel inside
the toothless mouths, hear 
the trammels in the skull-like heads
of famished peasants.
 
I want to don my animal skin,
unleash the beast within,
paint lines on white screens
with words iron-tinged.
Visitors would smell blood,
feel sulfur, see darkness curdling
the milkiness of light. Madness 
would sniff at their shoulders, 
like those raving masses 
in The Vision of the Pilgrims at San Isidro:
souls who lost their selfhood.
 
Across the centuries,
the screams through twisted lips, 
the vultures that eat the flesh of others,
the wild beasts that claw to the bone without thought
attest:
 
We are the same.
We are grotesque.                                                                                       
 
Louhi Pohjola

Louhi Pohjola was born in Montreal, Canada, to Finnish immigrant parents. She was a cell and molecular biologist before teaching sciences and humanities in a small high school in southern Oregon. She tends to write poems focused on the intersections of human behavior and the natural world, in particular, with black holes, the cosmos, and octopi. She is an avid fly-fisherwoman and river rock connoisseur. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and her temperamental terrier. The latter thinks that he is a cat.