Where All Choice Leads Of all the books I read in high school—the books assigned and studied—one has stayed with me: Wharton’s slim, sad tale of crippled Ethan Frome and his mistake and how he ruined three lives when pinched between desire and duty. Two decades on and that book still shifts back and forth in the satchel of my brain like the pair of curved cuticle scissors forgotten at the bottom of my purse until I prick myself on their point while digging for my keys. Still there my righteous anger at Ethan for betraying the awful Zeena and my own stupid desire for his escape to love with poor, dumb Mattie. And last week, of all the paintings at The Met, The Temptation of Saint Mary Magdalen has moved into my head with Ethan for it shows me, the secret me I’d rather not acknowledge or confront, the me caught between two choices and looking dumb and, maybe, drugged or drunk, my eyes lidded, nearly closed, my cheeks and that triangle at the base of my throat (the start of my breastbone) flushed red (with drink or passion), my breasts (or Mary’s) very nearly bare (more than half of one nipple exposed). Two figures—two men—one before me, one behind—compete for me. I look back at one richly robed and brightly lit, my head tipped back in surrender. As he looks down at me (or Mary), he wears a candied look, has both his hands on my arm and near my breast, both hands red, this man caught red-handed. He looks to me like temptation, desire embodied, but the museum placard says he is angel meant to save me from the other man with face obscured in shadows, hidden, his shoulders bare and powerful. This second man does not touch me, scarcely looks at me. He holds and might be offering a platter of gold or dirty dishes and leftover food scraps and looks not too unlike my husband after dinner party I slaved to host. And I (or Mary in this painting), we hold a human skull—symbol of death, of rot and decay, of fatal mistake?—the white bone browned by dirt. Either way. It’s a story as old as art. Cecil Morris Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English in California. Now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) to enjoy. He and his patient partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between the increasingly arid Central Valley of California and the cool Oregon Coast. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere.
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The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
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February 2025
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