Daywork by Jessica Fisher

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend October 8, 2015   Daywork   Jessica Fisher

Close your eyes he said and took my hand. There was something he wanted to show me, something I couldn’t see. Raised like a scar, a seam running through the body, here where the day went dark. I’d wanted to see the limits of sight, to know where the painter had found an edge, and stopped, the day done and the brushes washed, the figure left to dry, in the dark room someone half made would try to close his open eye and find that eye will stay open and never see, never see the rearing horse he rides you know the posture you’ve leant back in the saddle the beast beneath you pulled at its reins and told it to quit it can’t quit it’s trying to it’s trying to stop the bit in the mouth and no sight in its eyes seen and yet blind this was the drama he wanted to show don’t you think or think of the woman holding the room on her shoulders have you ever felt like that like you are to keep very still while the others move around you in birth I remember the midwife took my reins is that right she held me here and there and reached inside she was touching my baby I had nothing to do but let it happen I let it happen so well trained really a vehicle you ride me or drive me oh but if you are the head I am the neck I will turn you to my advantage will make you see what is wrought through me            Copyright © 2015 by Jessica Fisher. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I lived in Italy a few years ago, and while there became interested in the giornata—the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day. Sometimes in a finished fresco you’ll see the seams of adjacent giornate or ‘days,’ an effect I like both because it reminds us of the constraints of a body working in time, and because it points to the fractured nature of vision and story. I wrote this poem after visiting Raphael’s Room of Heliodorus in the Vatican Museum with one of the men responsible for the restoration. We were high up on the scaffolding, eye to eye with the painted figures, and I wanted to see how the work had been made, only the master had fully covered his tracks. The poem begins with my being shown what in that case could not be seen.” —Jessica Fisher   Jessica Fisher is the author of Inmost (Nightboat Books, 2012) and Frail-Craft (Yale University Press, 2007). She teaches at Williams College and lives in Western Massachusetts. Poetry by Fisher   Inmost (Nightboat Books, 2012) "Let Everything Happen to You" by Natalie Eilbert "Combustion " by Sara Eliza Johnson "My Proteins" by Jane Hirshfield Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038