Full Moon and Arms                                           



            As a portraitist in oils
            Who worked exclusively on canvasses,
            An expert in very fine detail,
            I was used to lingering immensely

            My subjects viewed my approach
            As flattery, my absorption
            A means of divination,
            Of exhuming from the façade
            Some exquisite melange,
            What they could only cloudily surmise
            But embraced with immoveable conviction:
            That they were irreproducible

            I drew them out in time, by touches,
            By the penitence of waiting 
            Till I showed them selves
            More powerfully than any glass

            It isn’t what you think:
            I was no panderer, 
            They didn’t carp at wrinkles
            Oddities, misshapen features,
            My rendering the gifts of their nativity
        
            They hung my visions 
            To feel, by gazing,
            Less hemmed in

            Which was why frescoes,
            The ones you insisted on dragging me to,
            Left me cold that day – 
            I knew what went into them,
            The technique was all too much,
            Mixing plaster, laying it just right, and then
            The race to paint before it dried, 
            The work of the great perhaps,
            But long past

            Or so I thought

            Outside the villa
            Where we sneaked away
            That sweltering afternoon

            There was just enough space
            Between the cypresses 
            To glimpse the ocean’s reach
            As we took each other in
            Like yours my back was raw 
            From the cool hard stone
            Of the sheltering wall,
            From reckless leaning

            And the moon’s rough cheek
            So close, rising 
            To mourn, to pounce

            Such passing tender


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            Emanuel E. García, 2014

          see here for 'visual accompaniment'