ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Amy Pence is the author of the hybrid book [It] Incandescent, winner of the International Eyelands Award, and the poetry collections Armor, Amour, The Decadent Lovely, and the chapbook Skin’s Dark Night. Pence’s work has appeared in a number of publications, including The Birmingham Poetry Review, The Oxford American, Western Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Writer’s Chronicle. A new chapbook, Your Posthumous Dress: Remnants from the Alexander McQueen Collection, is now out from dancing girl press.
Cabinet of Obsessions
Rain pummels the garden
a bird decomposes into a small house
heaved up by insects, then breaking apart
entrances /exits
.
my daughter’s seventeen-year-old wings
clipped and stowed in a rough box beneath my bed
her car tires spurn the gravel, leaving
.
a ribcage fills with tiny mites: ornithonyssus sylviarum
my ankles break or
her car spins from the road
.
no, the spirit does not enter here
.
watch how art obsesses
Artemisia Gentileschi’s sly allegory in self-portraits
paints herself as Judith, hacking at Holofernes’ head
looking like Tassi — the one who raped her
.
a fugue of black-whiskered faces
eyes stunned to see the knife
.
my friend John remembers the pompadours
of his James Dean youth
wanted a duck tail like that, lusted
for a girlfriend like that
hiking up on a washing machine
in her short dungarees, how
he wanted to stroke her hair back
between long thin fingers
.
let’s catalog these expressions disappearing:
pompadour, dungarees
.
what is frail
what is brutal
what pearls under the feet?
.
Gentileschi peers into the chiaroscuro
Tassi’s dismembered head big as a cabbage
.
a longing is not an obsession
I dreamed the slender wings
of what’s left of my girl’s youth
.
taillights stretch down the driveway
arching pulmonary trees
a morning polished by rain
I wrote “Cabinet of Obsessions” a few years ago now, and my daughter is actually an excellent driver, but the poem pulls out the drawers on the strange dreams, fears,and longings that preoccupied me at the time when I was not quite ready for her transition to driving. Sometimes the case in parenting — children march ahead of us. I thought my ankles would break every time I cycled or that tiny mites had invaded my bed. The early Baroque Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi came into my world view many years before, and I’m glad she’s been culturally rediscovered. Her many studies of Judith and Holofernes are instructive for the way she obsesses on that situation and castrates — or you know, beheads the subject who looks like her rapist — her art tutor Agostino Tassi. As with Gentileschi, art often takes us deeply into our private obsessions, but also some primal impulses that we share. We cannot prevent loss and lust, but our minds get grabby to ward off or hold on. Maybe it’s wise to open the cabinet and take a look inside once in awhile.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
