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| Albrecht Durer Self-Portrait at Age 28, 1500 |
Study #1: After Albrecht Dürer
Double eye. Double bind. Double blind.
The dark paints the dark in the dark.
I am the Christ. I am not the Christ.
I am not making claims, or so I claim.
So I watch my eyes, my eyes that work
in blue, in all that looks beautifully true.
When the doormaker throws the sun in
my face, and shows my eyes are brown,
you shan’t take my word for it any more.
Word can stand down, leave by the door.
Study #2: After Rembrandt van Rijn
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| Rembrandt van Rijn Self-Portrait, 1659 |
The guarantee is your willingness to make faces
at yourself, and to let the weather do likewise.
No plastic surgery. No wrinkle cream. No hair dye.
Laugh lines, you mock the sudden errors in the text.
The serious creases supertitle a slow crash.
This face is, you claim with a golden flourish, me.
Well, in that case, who am I? Who is this writing
about you, making you up as I paint, repaint,
affording you the best lines, begging a few laughs?
Who but this dour worrier is your dear guarantor?
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|
Vincent
van Gogh
Self-Portrait, 1889
|
Study #3: After Vincent van Gogh
God sank a mineshaft into me for a reason
I could not see in the coalmining district.
Coal dust ate the baby potatoes and beer.
When a man slammed into a woman, dust
climbed in their heads and formed a cloud.
I carried away what was mine, and burned
black into blue, red to rose, yellow to gold.
I burn a house and change it to a church.
I burn the fuse of flesh and my face bursts,
a wheel of fireworks, a vase of sunflowers.
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|
Egon Schiele Self-Portrait, 1911 |
Study #4: After Egon
Schiele
Look at me, cock in my claws,
combcrimson from scratching.
Skinny arms kink round my back
but can’t kill the screeching itch.
The hand can’t scratch its bones.
I snap off the blackened arrows
but their featherless beaks stab
the crying katydids, their broken
feet catch in the scattered flesh.
I stretch the canvas on the rack.
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|
Frida Kahlo Self-Portrait with Monkey, 1938 |
Study #5: After Frida Kahlo
I dream I am a wreck of a woman.
I am not grand like ruins, I am
not a broken column.
I am the traffic accident on
morning radio.
A bus handrail is sticking in my uterus like a huge
thumbtack.
My collarbone hangs from my throat like a necklace.
I dream a monkey is picking up bits of my spine with his
pale hands.
The monkey is carefully arranging me back together.
I hear the Professor say the monkey is the traditional
symbol for lust.
My monkey is very gentle.
When he is finished, I will take him to my breast, and offer
him my nipple.
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|
Andy Warhol Self-Portrait, 1986 |
Why be a man when you can be a brand?
Be copies the machine clicks to the market
to compete against other copies for a niche.
Not Nietzsche but Benjamin. My fancy
education. My immigrant genes. My coming
out or not coming out, and other agony stories.
What are they but printings on silkscreens,
recognizable by the cock or the shock of hair?
I’m waiting, like a dupe, in a photo booth,
wondering if I would pay for duplicates.
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|
Yasumasa Morimura,
Self-Portrait,
After Marilyn Monroe, 1996
|
and pulling the famous hair over my scalp,
I talk to Marilyn about loving Art, playing
dumb blonde, being closeted as one thing.
She answers, with a toss of her head,
her nipples erect as the stalk of a fruit,
Grab me.
I demur. Soft from politeness
or fear or disbelief.
She takes my hands
by the wrists, presses them between her
thighs. Now we can
talk about anything.
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| You've Read the Poems Now Buy the Book |
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