After Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holofernes (Uffizi, 1620) Because I know what rough work it is to fight off a man. And though, yes, I learned tenebroso from Caravaggio, I found the dark on my own. Know too well if Judith was alone, she'd never be able to claw her way free. How she and Abra would have to muster all their strength to keep him still long enough to labor through muscle and bone. Look at the old masters try their best to imagine a woman wielding a sword. Plaited hair just so. She's disinterested or dainty, no heft or sweat. As if she were serving tea—all model and pose. No, my Judith knows to roll her sleeves up outside the tent. Clenches a fistful of hair as anchor for what must be done. Watch the blood arc its way to wrist and breast. I have thought it all through, you see. The folds of flesh gathered at each woman's wrist, the shadows on his left arm betraying the sword's cold hilt. To defeat a man, he must be removed from his body by the candlelight he meant as seduction. She's been to his bed before and takes no pleasure in this. Some say they know her thoughts by the meat of her brow. Let them think what they want. I have but one job: to keep you looking, though I've snatched the breath from your throat. Even the lead white sheets want to recoil. Forget the blood, forget poor dead Caravaggio. He only signed one canvas. Lost himself in his own carbon black backdrop. To call my work imperfect would simply be a lie. So I drench my brush in a palette of bone black—femur and horn transformed by their own long burning—and make one last insistence. Between this violence and the sleeping enemies outside, my name rises. Some darknesses refuse to fade. Ergo Artemitia. I made this—I. Copyright © 2020 by Danielle DeTiberus. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 7, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets. |
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