Take a World

      "The Annunciation"
           Jan Van Eyck, 1434-36
    Take a world in which each flower's an Easter lily
    and books chivvy open to the place where our names leap.
    Then step into the temple where Mary,

    gown belled like a Christmas tree angel's,
    speaks with a real one. Their hands negotiate:
    Mary is asking why light curls to ribbony rainbow

    on the angel's back while through her own body
    it shoots in stiff gold arrows. The angel nods, grins.
    Nothing more gorgeous than their drapery-softened

    gesticulation, the room's blue-propped lilies
    and plump ottoman. It's enough to make us think
    they're standing in the world, two women alert

    to the heft of their clothes as Mary asks,
    "Who, me?", her eyes sliding sideways to her painter,
    master of distraction. She can't see Jehovah

    behind her, his one blazing window, though we can,
    we see the room's whole depth falling into light
    as we wait for someone not transfixed by dilemma

    who's standing where we are. As we wait for Joseph.


    Bain-Marie (St Mary's Bath)

      "Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub"
           Edgar Degas, 1885, pastel
    Scales from the snaky spine of the world
    she treads all day--these are eased
    in a pan so shallow we see her wavery feet,

    the red cloth she stoops for. If this were morning
    in the Renaissance we'd be stomping in a doorway,
    befurred and blowing on our fingers as light

    hardened in jewelled windows, pitched straight
    for her uterus. So thank heaven here
    the room is warm enough for nakedness--
    a steady simmer of light spills from the artist's
    grip into our own where it hurts,
    holding, as it does, the weight of our wish

    that she look back before the water cools,
    trusting us to let her work as Degas trusts sun,
    the pastel lengthening his fingers,

    the light-spun grit he rubs over and over
    into her body, what she'll wash away
    any minute with the warmth in her hand.




    Bio Note
      Terri Witek has had poems in The Antioch Review, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and Poetry and has a book on Lowell's revisions from the Univ. of Missouri Press.

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     Terri

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