The Convert
When in nineteen-thirty-seven, Etta Moten, sweetheart
of our Art Study group, kept her promise, as if clocked,
to honor my house at our first annual tea, my pride
tipped sky, but when she, Parisian-poised and as smart
as a chrome-toned page from Harper’s Bazaar, gave my shocked
guests this hideous African nude, I could have cried.
And for many subsequent suns, we, who had placed apart
this hour to proclaim our plunge into modern art, mocked
her “Isn’t he lovely?” whenever we eyed this thing,
for by every rule we’d learned, we’d been led to discern
this rankling figure as ugly. It hunched in a squat
as if someone with maliciously disfiguring intent
had flattened it with a press, bashing its head,
bloating its features, making huge bulging blots
of its lips and nose, and as my eyes in dread anticipation
pulled downward, there was its navel, without a thread
of covering, ruptured, exposed, protruding from a pot
stomach as huge as a mother-to-be’s, on short, bent legs,
extending as far on each side as swollen back limbs
of a turtle. I could look no farther and nearly dispensed
with being polite while pretending to welcome her gift.
But afterwards, to the turn of calendar pages, my eyes would skim
the figure appraising this fantastic sight,
until, finally, I saw on its stern
ebony face, not a furniture polished, shellacked shine,
but a radiance, gleaming as though a small light
had flashed internally; and I could discern
through the sheen that the bulging eyes
were identical twins to the bulging nose.
The same symmetrical form was dispersed again
and again through all the bulges, the thighs
and the hands and the lips, in reverse, even the toes
of this fast turning beautiful form were a selfsame chain,
matching the navel. This little figure stretched high
in grace, in its with-the-grain form and from-within-glow,
in its curves in concord. I became a hurricane
of elation, a convert undaunted, who wanted to flaunt
her discovery, parade her fair-contoured find.
Art clubs, like leaves in autumn fall,
scrabble against concrete and scatter.
And Etta Moten, I read, is at tea with the Queen.
But I find myself still framing word structures
of how much these blazing forms ascending the centuries
in their muted sheens, matter to me.
Notes:
Reprinted with permission of Broadside Lotus Press from Impressions of African Art Forms in the Poetry of Margaret Danner (Broadside Press, 1960).
This work is part of the portfolio “‘These Blazing Forms’: The Life and Work of Margaret Danner” from the March 2022 issue.
Source: Poetry (March 2022)