Forcing the ludicrous death head between your breasts — a sugar skull
Dancing last things, imagine fingering you draw with speed slap paint.
Picture roses awful thorns departures sworn last flowing free The V
of Viva a dipping up and down and—
Shatter let me shatter along with you a little
the plaster cracking
A little free.
In the upper register a frieze of androgynous profiles shedding tears.
From the operating theater looking up you hear voices dying away in the garden. Voices are whispering and you are dying in their formal arrangements of posthumous appraisals — their raves, their dismissals. Most artists lead unhappy lives, but only one has ever achieved cult status by making her unhappy face the main subject of her work. Frida Kahlo’s specialty was suffering, and she adopted it as an artistic theme as confidently as Mondrian claimed the rectangle or Rubens the corpulent nude. The majority of her paintings are self-portraits. If you’ve seen just one you can guess what awaits you in the others: a dark-haired woman with large eyes, a single run-on eyebrow and an expression any tragic heroine would envy. Leg falling. Leg breaking. In the agreement. In the consensus, the condescension. Those plaster pedestals. Leave me be.
And you play one last time directly into their disdain. Narcissist, drama queen, dabbler, hysteric. Dying posthumously from their potshots: Rivera was a better artist than his wife, but it’s she who is now enshrined as a saint. Her self-portraits sell for the requisite millions, and Madonna, who collects them is planning a movie based on her life. This meeting between the Material Girl and the Mexican Communist might seem a bit surreal, but no more so than the current fashion for producing worshipful books on the artist. The tomes of the past few years include a cookbook of her “fiesta” recipes and a biography for teenage girls that presents the artist as the most exemplary female role model since Florence Nightingale.
Little girls playing at grownup things. Their disdain. In the diminished, in the belittled. An astonishingly vapid pornographic fantasy, from the Brown/Columbia professor whose previous labors in this vineyard (The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, 1994, etc.) have been praised by some as masterly … Although the poetic sequences contain striking passages and vivid images, they can’t convey a story in any recognizable sense, running the high risk of rapidly coming to seem pointless. Unfortunately, they form the whole of the book.
In the mean-spirited, in the demeaning
Floating: a pair of red legs severed from the body — and between them a pair of lips.
Hair on fire tiny shrunken Frida heads on fire. Tongues are lapping, laughing, lapsing last grotesque,
total eclipse on fire. A dancing pair of lips. Insisting insinuating separating now you see—
In one 1951 Still Life now lost the flagpole’s pointed tip emerges inside the halved fruit’s soft dark interior.
And I am still caught in it, in you again and writing the Frida etudes and singing little patriotic songs demented songs, let’s hear one, in the bleak hilarity of the end. Lips lowered. Magenta.
Wayward songs and love — through the condescension — making a muffled song up.
Parts of her
fall away
a hand
an eye
everything we’ll usually need a mouth a wing
hair on fire
look over there
It’s like floating
Your hands arranging …
The visible wing of the misshapen angel.
Pulque—a kind of ambrosia,
Sing me into the end she begs.
Black rose of blood flowering in the eye
Crow feathers glittering in the corners of the room.
Monkey fur.
Where does your life go?
You put it in a box. Marked 3 7 9. Fingering the necklace of
humming birds and thorns
dark corridor.
down the dark hall
to the crematorium.
I am the disintegration you scrawl you scratch paw — The noise of steel against skin—Are you leaving then?
No.
Another shot of Demerol
Votive: oblivion
So touch me with your disembodied hand. It will be like floating, it will be like living some.
How badly do you want it?
— other side.
carrying a wooden box.
Men in black ascend double staircases carrying the wooden box but you are out watching the solar eclipse.
You are out singing off-color songs in front of a falling curtain of velvet and pulque and blood. The furious theater of you. “Diego please make her stop. The operatic pitch of Kahlo’s sentiments left little room for the day-to-day particulars of experience. Her diary provides neither startling disclosures nor the sort of mundane, kitchen-sink detail that captivates by virtue of its ordinariness.… Kahlo’s diary allows for no such dreamy identification with its subject, whose life was less lived than staged.” Deborah Solomon “reviewing” your diary in the New York Times would like to insult you a little longer
But you are out painting solitude.
drawing a right foot.
drawing
hair on fire. Shaking your fetus in a bottle.
remembering …
Frida adored children. She believed they possessed purer creative powers than adults.
The tone of the box 10 our fathers—
the hum of the box.
— are ascending double staircases with roses and weeping.
10 our fathers
hope
But they are in another corner of the dark garden altogether
force — feeding each other flowers. What links them to each other is a tendril, a fragile line of paint, a word.
She smirks. Good-bye on fire
See how she—
Fetus V viva
Viva la vida she writes in red with only one week left to live. Amputated leg and life. The grave we dig all night.
Dress on fire halo tendril.
Toward the end of June when her health improves she will ask, What are you going to give me now as a prize since I’m getting better? I’d like a doll best
The strange dancing legs.
I would like a doll most.
She covers her wooden leg with boots made of red leather with Chinese gold emblazoned and bells embroidered. And she dances. But only once. Heartbroken. Love me. How badly tonight.
Life — begging for it by then, remembering she smiles — she’ll be begging for it by then. Not yet.
A perfect day: make love, take a bath, make love again.
And sucking drugs and roses. If you could feel what I feel. And she carves a door. The drone of the box and the cross and the word.
love, love.
In another garden altogether
force — feeding you the end
Knife through the succulent melon — knife through. All the weeping fruit. She whispers bites my ear but gently blurs, seduction, love, no blood, she whispers, biting—Shh — Shh — or they’ll hear—
Men ascend with dirges but.
With Glory Bes to the Father and to the Son but.