Self-Portrait as a Vermeer Painting
I am window, third eye into the family dwelling
that directs, by illumination, your gaze
towards the peripheral — not the face of the woman
bent to her piano keys, but the mirror’s reflection
of her tilted cheek; not the dim passage to a squalid
kitchen yard, but the milkmaid’s alabaster brow
bent to her pitcher releasing milk-gleam
of white touched with blue. The dew-shine
of young skin. The flare-dot on a sable eye
as daylight angles across it … I am caressed
by the gaze and brush of a man who
fathered eleven and might have wished
to escape his fecund household for a tankard
and raucous talk, but sought instead my quiet
interiors and their inhabitants whose faces
are soft with solitude and singular thought
as they lower their eyes to a letter or book, and you
are the voyeur invited into these privacies.
I am the still point where angles meet
like star glints to direct your gaze towards
my center, though you are
unaware of this. Jerry-built
of patience and careful layers
of illusion, I am unequivocally real.
* * * * *
Self-Portrait as an O’Keeffe Flower
I was never what the critics proclaimed —
they never touched the core of me, those smug
assumptions that swirled and swelled until they
self-combusted over tepid wine and canapés
at gallery openings, and filled the columns of Artforum
and Art News with Freudian jargon, condescension
and self-importance. I stayed out of it — as did
O’Keeffe. She removed herself to a high-desert
dwelling made of straw and mud, where the light
worked its magic over uninhabited expanses of sand
and sage and layers of ancient rock, while I remained
on canvas to be exhibited, purchased, and endlessly
reproduced. So let me set things straight: I am not
orifice, not birth-portal, and most surely not
invitation. I arise from the lineage of Michelangelo
and Fibonacci, divinely proportioned, my center
the still point from which my petals open in homage
to the nature’s laws that govern a lot more than
the sex life of humans. So leave the vagina out of it.
And virginity. Whatever else I hide in there
is mine alone, and I guard it the way the skull, which
O’Keeffe also chose to paint, surrounds the secrets
of thought, feeling and sometimes genius.