Portraits of Three Women

Oh Sylvia

The Revenge of Dora Maar

Daughter of the mountains

Oh Sylvia

Bitch goddess of the self

Vertical invader of the male

World, Sylvia, you fed

Your own body to the fire

Of the one thing you could

Not conceive into you: immortality.

Like the snake that eats its

Own tail, you folded cadavers

Of your family into a

Guernican origami.

When contentment spurned you

Your acidic ambition corroded

Your flesh, but left untouched

The apparition that rose, walked

Across your Ouija board

Into sunlight.

You screamed "Ted, Ted"

But it neither turned

Nor lost symptons of flesh.

Sylvia, you lost not to a saint

But to an unlit corner of your ignorance;

You did not split the first atom

Of existence

Muses are not poets

Nor poets competing gods

In a rat race at Smith

The Revenge of Dora Maar

Once your tongue has fingered

The wet gossamer of woman

You made her your next work

The Guernica you sold the world

You had found in a woman

Who came seeking the war

In your smoldering eyes

You wolfed them, milked

Drops of their evil into your palette.

Every time a virtue tempted

You sold an Apollinaire

Artful matador that you are

You died a monkey on a window

Seeing once glowing skin turn loose tarpaulin

Over flaccid muscles, twig bones

Under the gaze of the whore

You hired for that elusive hard-on

Picasso, the Faustus who won

Is framed in formalin

In the portrait of Dora Maar.

Daughter of the mountains

(for Abha Sah, elder, friend and insatiable child)

The colloidal image that stares

With Buddha eyes back at you

Is you. Vanity and gamine diffidence,

The feuding wives of desire

Beaten and stirred like egg white,

annular cataract halo of your iris,

In the sagging translucent tetrapack,

Of your crinkled cotton skin

Starved of cholesterol, for fear of excess.

Fifty-five kilos of childborne flesh

Like the sun, wanton bully of the mountains,

Your feet trammeled in schoolgirl excitement

As if it's ancient craggy chest were

The familiar stairs of your gothic school,

Every experience scorched your skin

Singed the already sparse hair

While the spine tingled with the chill

Of the freezing draft, a nun's recrimination

Flapping beyond its own strength

Like an orphan clothe caught in the storm,

Clinging to the line the family forgot

To take indoors, you lived your life

Inside out. Like people do in cold climes

Married to the tropics, you remained

Dressed for winter.

In the whites of widowhood

You crossed the equator

And like prodigal sons your return home

Froze your parents and your children

In the dread of habitual anticipation

Playing for unimaginable stakes

What now?

Will she?

What if she did ?

Now a stranger in your mother's lap

With the face of her daughter.

You will not fulfill any of their fears

Your diffidence will apologise

For every privilege granted free.

And yet your vanity will lurch

At those who foretell publicly

The futility of family fears.

A driftwood is peaceful in the tormented

Waters of vagabond mountain rooks,

Condensing all whispers in the heart of a gossip

Till it outlives the promise of scandal.

While you drifted, the whispers molted

The driftood's wisdom was not destined for you.

Your life is a seasonal song sung only by the old

For only the old covet songs of youthful princesses.