Poussin
By G.C. Waldrep
After T.J. Clark
Two underworlds, in Poussin.
The one touched by the force
of necessity, the other
remaining untouched.
Simone Weil makes her way
to the refectory
in Ashford. She walks slowly
down the corridors, with
or without help.
The hem of her gown brushes
the maculate plaster
of the long wall.
She could live forever
inside this moment,
she thinks, or begins to think
(the beginning of a thought).
She is wrong, of course.
The great hand bravely
channels the fear our mouths
have become, so suddenly.
Just the base of the thumb
illuminated, in its
flex, away from the viewer.
Two underworlds,
& the pollen settling
against the washerwoman’s
drying fabrics:
semantic parlor
in which the magic lantern
images flicker.
Weil’s elbow, akimbo
with what’s left of her body,
& Weil herself,
aware of the image
she becomes in the long hall.
It doesn’t have to mean
anything, the other patients
who saw her
or whom she saw,
their depleted & depleting
forms.
Ignorance is my true labor.
The text wounds me
into a history
of belief, phrase by phrase.
(The forensics, Weil
might well have stressed.)
The chaste thirst
of the classical
running alongside its own
shadow, its double
it can’t, ultimately, know.
Two underworlds:
the foreshortening
of the prone body, & the cry
that precedes it,
genuflecting
to the fiction that it trusts.
Notes:
Audio poem performed by the author with assistance from recording technician Paulo Botelho.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2024)