Who’s there?
She soaps the stairs. And shouting from nowhere, insolent child, watch out fat man your wife is coming! You’ll be caught, face of a dog, face of a frog (his hundred clandestine affairs) Just a girl.
My only ambition is to have a child by Diego Rivera, the painter. And I am going to tell him someday.
Frida you are crazy.
Just a girl at the Prepa.
Incessant dreaming: a fat man with a palette
on a scaffold casting
beauty, casting appalling
possibility on her—
childish pranks — to dispel the strangeness.
Her sexual halo even then. You must have been an angel. He mutters from the height.
Heat and light.
And one day she shall marry it.
But for now. And you return to the frame. And posing is like freedom some — sometimes.
Her dreamy teenage dreamboat, Alejandro — who will leave her—sorry — loose, promiscuous one.
Incessant drumming dreaming
Answer me.
Voracious in the afternoon.
The girls say they are dying — incessant dreaming — asked to conform. In the thorned courtyard — exhausted — by all the tired forms.
Asked to believe those.
Assume those.
Revere those.
(Draw a blue door)
Preposterous sexual stances of modesty and silence—
A little free, a door. The girls liked to kiss in the shadows….
Smooth and perfect thigh tonight
World tonight
Voracious, irreverent — assume those postures of I’m sorry and silence — curious one, self-indulgent, mischief maker. Fulang Chang! she shouts with glee.
Answer me.
Who’s there?
Drawn to the vision.
Partially revealed. Voracious: microscope, lens, window, eye.
The girls say they are in those rooms of judgment and pronouncements, dying. In the hedges. And they leave the frame.
Sparklers. And she draws a blue door. Dips her hands in the
Votive: chalice
The girls liked to—
kiss sometimes and other things
The two girls loved to dance
Her charms and secret numbers — setting off sparklers. Fetish, altar, free a little—venga—Come to me. Blue world, magenta, red. The way color keeps opening flower chalice. Just a girl.
Mischief maker … drinking tequila like a real mariachi.
The girls say they are.
The two girls loved to loiter in the public gardens of the university district where they would listen to the organ-grinders and chat with truants and newsboys. The two girls loved. And the bells.
Tolling miraculous cup. Sun drenched. She dips her hands.
Beauty is convulsive, as Breton will say. As your friend André Breton will say someday—or not at all—
Incessant dreaming Answer me.
She is the alegría girl — the way beauty keeps coming — the way color vibrates — convulsive — drawn
to the swirling
drawn
to the light.
She is the alegría girl — incessant dreaming — sparklers—come to me—already on fire.
ACCIDENT
“… A short while ago, maybe a few days ago, I was a girl walking in a world of colors, of clear and tangible shapes. Everything was mysterious and something was hiding; guessing its nature was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to attain knowledge all of a sudden — like lightning elucidating the earth! Now I live on a painful planet, transparent as ice. It’s as if I had learned everything at the same time, in a matter of seconds….”
Votive: Diego
Nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the green-gold of your eyes. My body fills itself with you for days and days. You are the mirror of night. The violent light of lightning.
The perfect flame of you.
Smell of oak essence, memo-
ries of walnut, green breath
of ash tree. Horizon and land-
spaces I traced them with a kiss.
Oblivion of words will form
the exact language for
understanding the glances of
our closed eyes.
==You are intangible
and you are all the universe which
I shape into the space of my
room. Your absence springs
trembling in the ticking of the
clock, in the pulse of the light;
you breathe through the mirror. From
you to my hands, I caress
your entire body, and I am with
you for a minute and I am with
myself for a moment. And my
blood is the miracle which
runs in the vessels of the air
from my heart to yours.
My Prince sapo-rana. Idol-mountain. Fountain flower. Child. My fingertips touch your blood.
ACCIDENT
it is coming. my hand. my red vision.
ACCIDENT
Red covers the page. And a kind of glitter.
Look.
~ ~ ~
The visible wings of the misshapen angel.
Votive: Child
Because I wanted you with all my blood but it was not to be — because I wanted you with everything — little monkey, melon, swallow — color, color
Heart, I would have given you every color
but it was not to be….
In a 1930 drawing of herself and Rivera, she drew and then erased a baby Diego, seen as if by X-ray vision inside her stomach: the infant’s head is up, his feet are down.
Three more times she shall try to have a child
Frida had all kinds of dolls: old-fashioned ones, cheap Mexican dolls made of rags or of papier-mache. Chinese dolls are propped on a shelf near her pillow. Beside her bed is an empty doll bed where she once kept a favored doll, and three little dolls are enclosed with her baptism dress in a vitrine in her bedroom. One that she treasured, a boy doll that had been given to her by a cachucha (probably Alejandro) shortly after her accident, when she was hospitalized.
Because I wanted
The earth is a grave and the earth is a garden poor child rest there, poor child play there forever. The earth holds the tiny hands, the eyes, the little genitals, rest.
Its birth certificate filled out in elegant scroll His mother was Frieda Kahlo
take this sorrow: child
I would give you fistfuls of color