Thrall (5 page)

With Velázquez    in Rome

    a divination

At market    I lingered to touch

    the bright hulls of lemons

            closed my eyes until

    the scent was oil

and thinner    yellow ocher

    in my head

            And once

the sudden taste of iron

            a glimpse of red

    like a wound opening

            the robes of the pope

at portrait

    that bright shade of blood

            before it darkens

purpling nearly to black

Because he said

    painting was not

    
labor
    was

the province of free men

    I could only

watch    Such beauty

    in the work of his hands

            his quick strokes

    a divine language I learned

over his shoulder

            my own hands

tracing the air

    in his wake    Forbidden

            to answer in paint

I kept my canvases secret

            hidden until

    Velázquez decreed

            unto me

    myself    Free

I was apprentice    he

            my master still

How intently at times

    could he fix his keen eye

            upon me

though only once

    did he fix me    in paint

my color a study

    my eyes wide

            as I faced him

a lace collar at my shoulders

    as though I'd been born

            
noble

    the yoke of my birth

gone from my neck

    In his hand    a long brush

            to keep him far

    from the canvas

far from it    as I was

    the distance between us

            doubled    that

he could observe me

    twice    stand closer

            to what
he
made

For years    I looked to it

    as one looks into a mirror

            And so

in
The Calling of Saint Matthew

    I painted my own

likeness    a freeman

    in the House of Customs

            waiting to pay

my duty    In my hand

    an answer    a slip of paper

            my signature on it

    
Juan de Pareja
    
1661

Velázquez    one year gone

    Behind me

            upright on a shelf

a forged platter    luminous

            as an aureole

    just beyond my head

            my face turned

to look out from the scene

    a self-portrait

To make it

            I looked at how

my master saw me    then

    I narrowed my eyes

Now

    at the bright edge

of sleep    
mother

She comes back to me

    as sound

            her voice

in the echo of birdcall

    a single syllable

            again

and again    my name

Juan Juan Juan

or    a bit of song    that

            waking

I cannot grasp

Mexico, 1969

 

Why not make a fiction

            of the mind's fictions? I want to say

it begins like this: the trip

                      a pilgrimage, my mother

kneeling at the altar of the Black Virgin,

            enthralled—light streaming in

                      a window, the sun

            at her back, holy water

    in a bowl she must have touched.

 

What's left is palimpsest—one memory

    bleeding into another, overwriting it.

            How else to explain

                      what remains? The sound

    of water in a basin I know is white,

            the sun behind her, light streaming in,

                      her face—

    as if she were already dead—blurred

            as it will become.

 

I want to imagine her before

    the altar, rising to meet us, my father

                      lifting me

            toward her outstretched arms.

    What else to make

            of the mind's slick confabulations?

                      What comes back

is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface,

            light filtered through water

 

closing over my head, my mother—her body

    between me and the high sun, a corona of light

            around her face. Why not call it

    a vision? What I know is this:

I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna;

                      someone pulled me through

    the water's bright ceiling

                      and I rose, initiate,

            from one life into another.

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs

    at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:

his forehead white with illumination—

 

a lit bulb—the rest of his face in shadow,

    darkened as if the artist meant to contrast

his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

 

By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,

    he was already linked to an affair

with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue

 

and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems

    to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out

across the centuries, his lips fixed as if