because I wanted
you here your dress over there.
Diego don’t go
Black in the gaps between leaves shows that the time is night which to Frida meant the end of life
Diego
And you break into two Fridas — one the Frida whom Diego loves and the other the Frida Diego no longer loves.
Rupture Forceps Incision
the motive, Diego, was always you, and if the pain might be relieved, a little. And to keep you. And the knife, and the sweet suture, oh it will feel like being alive or—
the autoeroticism of her wounds
the thing that impels patients to want surgery, love me, love me my frog-prince,
and the footless, and the headless, the cracked open and bleeding — not passive, not dying
don’t go out that door
— open me
And I want desperately …
open me up
What do you want desperately?
Don’t go out that door.
The hours were broken
libidinous she gives herself freely now she takes
Silky and yellow yellow for illness and madness the way that hair might have felt, her hair in your hands, like a real gringa
the succulent root
Diego
Don’t go.
Hair on fire candle table shirt ablaze—
Diego gone again Maria Felix on fire—stay
In the sound of the clock as he moves away
frieze:
A line of Diego heads — A row of Diegos — frieze—
don’t go.
the Judas of your touch
we are held together by tears
Numbers, the economy
the farce of words
nerves are blue.
I don’t know why — also red,
but full of color.
Diego, Diego
We are held together by arrows now.
~ ~ ~
martyrdom of glass. the great nonsense
Votive: Oblivion
votive: Diego are the vows you take
9 arrows
votive: oblivion to kill the pain
In the sound of the clock, in the pulse of the light,
Diego, Diego.
In the violence, in the calm Diego, Diego,
my child, my light.
A childish thing.
Child of the people
Child of the revolution
Child of brilliance (standing on a scaffold)
But always a child.
Frog kingdom prince.
Mirror of night.
Child of the great occultist
Child of cruelty
Her bridled, brotheled humor
love Diego
and love Diego
demented
covered in gold a metal rod through her pelvis
and love Diego is just another
maiming thing
another kind of injury
transforming thing.
Accident:
the landscape is day and night.
And she remembers when her mouth …
She lures men up double staircases to her lair—
as he breaks her heart again Diego just to keep up.
Her library of lovers, her Noguchi, her Trotsky, Diego, Diego.
Her viva Sandino, her viva Zapata, Diego, Diego
for you
All the assassinated ones. And that cinema of poverty.
Singing drunken patriotic songs all night
the theater of their lives.
Diego who never entirely leaves her body
a maiming thing
mountainous thing
passion retablo
Accident:
imagine a red plea in the bright light
asking God, one and one last — furious—answer me—one and only one last time—answer me.
papier — mache Judas Diego no.
And he breaks her heart again—
answer me and again.
And he wants her only to paint
don’t break, don’t go, stay
9 thorns in a cup
arms and glitter flung
imagine she dares — imagine — what lies under these
clothes, broken.
that pleasuring toward paradise
Diego
She applies paint to the skin of the canvas:
I penetrate the sex of the whole earth, its heat embraces me and in my body everything feels like the freshness of tender leaves…. At times your presence floats continuously as if wrapping all my being in the anxious wait for morning. And I notice that I am with you. In this moment still full of sensations, my hands are plunged in oranges, and my body feels surrounded by you.
My hands are sunk in oranges.
She remembers when her mouth — pressed to the ear — to the hum of the paint and the blood:
don’t kiss anyone else
magenta, dark green, yellow
And she watches him. Hair on fire, hair on firepaintnot my sister liar wild she paintsnot my sister wayward: live not you too Cristina
liar
wild life on fire
And she watches him betray her with her sister.
(red covers the page)
Running through the glade, the deer is pierced by
9 arrows
And she opens herself like a fruit to every man
And the women too. Oh yes you are beautiful and Diego
would approve
My fingertips touch your blood. She draws.
These are the vows you take.
votive: vision
the stitches do not close over
Crimson
Crimson
Crimson
Crimson like the blood that runs
when they kill a deer.
Pierced by 9 Cristinas why
And she paints — the dark paw draped over the shoulder, the small black eyes — there, there, tenderly, there now so tenderly the way color — the way color has always — the way paint the way—Eyes in the hands and a sense of touch in the eyes.
Diego
Kiss me love me a little longer — standing in front of this bit of miracle — this little piece of paradise, honesty, beauty, bliss, lucidity, she paints:
two butterflies in the braid, two flowers laid over the leaf green (sadness, science, the whole of Germany is this color) and the encroaching foliage — the eyebrows a hummingbird and around the neck — delicate drops of blood — the hummingbird hanging from thorns — on the shoulders the black monkey, the black cat, and the butterflies will be white and the flowers will be white, a little free and the white of the blouse — the crimson mouth — and the eyes are certain — and the eyes — both dead and alive — see far—
And it comes to her
And it comes to her in awe.
I cannot love Diego for what he is not.
Reunion
“… Diego still loses all the letters that reach his hands, and he leaves his papers everywhere … he gets very cross when one calls him for a meal, he pays compliments to all the pretty girls, and sometimes he makes an ant eye with some of the city girls who arrive unexpectedly, on the pretext of ’showing them’ his frescoes, he takes them for a day or two … to see the different landscapes…. for a change he no longer fights as he did before with the people who bother him when he is working, his fountain pens go dry, his clock stops and every fifteen days it has to be sent to be fixed, he keeps wearing those huge miner’s shoes (he has used the same ones for three years). He gets furious when he loses the keys of the car, and usually they appear in his own pocket, he never exercises and never sunbathes: he writes articles for newspapers that generally cause a terrific uproar, he defends the IV International with cloak and sword, and he is delighted that Trotsky is here….