-
Self Portrait with Cataracts
- Prairie Schooner
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 80, Number 1, Spring 2006
- pp. 156-159
- 10.1353/psg.2006.0071
- Article
- Additional Information
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Prairie Schooner 80.1 (2006) 156-159
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Self Portrait with Cataracts
Steve Gehrke
Self Portrait with Cataracts
Work of the eyes is done, now
Go and do heart-work
On all the images imprisoned within– RilkeBecause, by now, art gives his own loss
back to him, camouflaged
as beauty, because the self,
distilled, echoes back
through harbor stone and lily,
through rose-arch
and wisteria, he paints, finally,
himself retreating
into the foxholes of his eyes,
his whole face smudged
beneath the cataract's gleam,
drowning in the broth light,
one eye covered completely
when he paints,
the other planetary in the atmospheric
glass, his monocle,
gold-rimmed, radiating scowl-lines
around the eye, so that when
he places the canvas on the floor
as if to look on a landscape,
he sees, among the white-tipped reeds
and the bridge-line
frowning across the wrinkles
of the face, two birds
where the eyes had been,
their feathers tucked in, [End Page 156]
heads bowed, not moving at all,
though their feet paddle
desperately beneath. Hovering
like that – ethereal,
not a self, but a wave
curled up out of the self,
so its reflection is its source – he feels
a storm break inside
his face as a light mist rises
from the paint, the way,
years earlier, the ground floor
abandoned to the flood,
he stood, upstairs, watching torn
leaves smeared across
the water, violent and seductive,
like the trail of clothes
across a bedroom floor, although –
he remembers remembering
this – it was February, so that he
was watching, not leaves,
but the ruins of his own uprooted
garden, a flotilla
of marguerites and bellflower,
processional of blue
thistle, pink sumac, Alice,
behind him, shivering
in the bed, feverish, leukemia
passing through her,
poisonous as color through a leaf,
the hook of each breath
unstitching something inside
of her, as if she were becoming
the rattle in the shutters,
as if she were slowly turning
herself into the window
he was gazing through, [End Page 157]
so that he knew, even then,
that he would never
not be looking through her,
each morning in the mirror,
his face laid on top of her face.
When she died, he prayed,
one night, for whatever comes
to lean down over him
and pluck the flowers of his sight.
Going blind, he imagined,
was a way to feel her
leaving him again, as his first
wife had, his whole life now
like a fist loosening from
around the moment of his birth.
But the hand keeps
longing for the weight
of the amputated brush,
and his hand, like a moth freed,
finally, from the candle wax
of grief, would unfurl –
for his lilies, for his own spirit
weaved through the trellis
of the body – each stroke
from the memory of tendons,
of light, as now, leaning down
to darken out the eyes,
he remembers, at the window
again that night, seeing,
on the surface, like a tiny
lighthouse tumbled from
the shore, the lantern
he had hung one morning
in a tree, still lit, the severed
branch holding it up above
the waves. And how later, [End Page 158]
when she grew silent, he held
a small mirror just above
her mouth, then swiped, almost
thoughtlessly, a finger
through the breath
he'd captured on the glass.
...