[With Muse (Dream), Oil on canvas, 1918, Private collection]
Blue beyond blue
my angel cometh;
heady with the radiance of his gifts
I drank annunciation
into the womb of art,
its holy canvas
with the power of sighs
and mutilation of its threads of
bones and voices,
gaiety of mourning,
struggles of stars
flames of twilight, fire of dawn
and the harsh wind over the steppe
could see me from afar
touching my canvas with its painful song.
God, I was young,
prodigious in my hopes, fleeing
from galley-slave and colours of all the demons
did I escape the pale,
westward to a new freedom.
The ancient past of modernism
mine to dream, the Bible lying in my hands,
its patriarchs and prophets,
Talmuds housed in wooden shacks,
hasids large as giants dancing on rooves;
falling stars translucent as the snow,
farm animals in the smoke of air
and wombs bearing their gifts
and prayers and prayers.
Who scythed at our celestial nerves;
thought them my gypsy colours,
saw green and purple Jews and red
shooting from the earth,
and saw their pain
and with an artist's seeing
whose greys I later prismed into light
From all those millions
- all -
David descending with his harp
to me
like glass in all the glory
of its tribal colours
recites the psalms'
long joyous kaddish of the world.
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Self-Portraits
PoetryThis poem is an imagined self-portrait of Vermeer. You can see the painting on the internet by typing in the information below the title.
