pygmalion

[the afflicted's attempt at writing something to speak, rather than something to read, to present at a Friday evening meeting for her kind.]

There’s someone I know - you know those someones you know.
Particular somehow - lockige Haare,
explosive eyes,
nests in smalls of backs.
Sometimes I stare at someone I know
and see the gesture lines beneath the clothes
because I was an artist once,
I know a muse when I see one.
You’d look lovely
turning into a laurel tree,
for instance, or maybe Mary,
somewhat post-Byzantine,
with baby Joshua on one mother-wide hip.
The temptation remains to paint over all that hand-draped still-life cloth
because - you and I know, everyone knows - still-life is boring,
and we’d all rather see the soul and the skin.
Don’t take it the wrong way -
nude sculpture was never “ok,”
especially not, say,
standing larger-than-life in Jerusalem
waving in the invading pantheon.
And those Venuses hanging about Roman homes
were kept in masters’ private rooms
to be sculpted finer still by those strange eyes.
I wonder: do statues suffer from Electra complexes,
missing, needing fathers who made them?
Do foreign hands frighten them?
This isn’t like that.
I just wanna play Pygmalion with you,
but I promise, not the way Freud thinks I do,
and I’ll keep my dreams of Jung at bay.
No, I’m asking you -
Crack my marble or sculpt my clay,
cast me bronze and rust me green
just the way you’d want to see someone you know - you know.
I’m pretty attached to myself, as attached as the next invincible adolescent,
but listen -
take a chisel to me, work carefully,
and I’ll let it go to be
the next Met installation piece.
Teach me your beauty, and hey
I’m sorry about the irregularities -
maybe you hadn’t noticed yet
but this marble’s streaked with garnet
pretty bad,
leaving purple bruises in the pink-white.
They don’t just heal out, and you know
there’s pressure down in the mantle,
future blood diamonds gouging this way and that,
and no one gets their marble
without a little metamorphism.
So what do you think -
now look seriously -
could you make art out of this?