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Fingernails
for Rita Dove
One fingernail takes about six months
to grow from base to tip, but yours
don’t grow as much as gleam,
grand with color that cannot come
just from any ordinary bottle, miniature
art on each long tip—spirals and slices
of color—tiny canvases sparkling.
Are those nails—those flashes of vermillion
chartreuse, red—or are they nebulae
meant to dazzle us mere mortals
bashful in our hangnails, bitten cuticles?
The half-moon at the base
of each nail is called lunula,
but you have moons
of your own making,
painted on the shell of each
finger, bold for the world to behold.
Your poems, sleek and beautiful
as the hues on your hands,
move like your fingers, and I try
to figure out what it means
to be a poet whose fingertips
hush everyone silent, in awe
of what a woman of color can do.
Tourist Attraction
Come play in my graceland;
take a long, slow dip in my
reflecting pool, patriotic and
aroused all at once. Come climb
my monuments, all the way
up my arch and back down again,
for truly, I am the gateway
to the west. Take a trip to my
empire state building, where
the observation deck is always
packed, teeming with warmth
and a certain giddy dizziness
that comes with profound heights.
Tour my zoos, urban menageries full
of fins and feathers, downy nests
and botanical wonders—flora, fauna,
footprints. For you, I’m the painted
desert, the fruited plain, the streetcar,
subway, the El and tube, the English
channel and the Ivory Coast. Universal,
I’m the great adventure, rollercoaster
with so many happy loops
you scream when you finally
plunge down, get off. For you,
I’m waiting, open, no
lines at my ticket booths,
no charge at my welcome gates.
Figure Study, Reclining Female
You make me the object of your gaze,
etch me in strokes on paper, my likeness
a haunted chiaroscuro, my wary face
turned out to meet your viewer, naked
body turned for privacy, the bedspread–
our bedspread–rumpled and gathered
below my feet, tossed there as if after
consummation. I sling one arm across
my breasts, elbow out, look over my
shoulder, do not smile because a smile
will ruin this, your reckoning of me.
Instead you detail my hair, eyes,
heels, the small of my back, curves,
the bare plain terrain of my stomach.
Here our bed is documented for your
public: our pillow and mattress
slung on the floor, our walls unadorned.
You claim you adore me, that I must
stay still, pose glacial and transparent
for an etching that will hang in a gallery
hours and years from your barren studio.
Why do you not paint me with color,
make me vibrate instead of shiver,
my skin flushed pink as it actually is?
No one will know me except for this
facade, and those who see this portrait
will think me passive, submissive, far
from feminist. But to know all I am
will take more pictures than you can create,
will take a finer artist to make me live.
for Rita Dove
One fingernail takes about six months
to grow from base to tip, but yours
don’t grow as much as gleam,
grand with color that cannot come
just from any ordinary bottle, miniature
art on each long tip—spirals and slices
of color—tiny canvases sparkling.
Are those nails—those flashes of vermillion
chartreuse, red—or are they nebulae
meant to dazzle us mere mortals
bashful in our hangnails, bitten cuticles?
The half-moon at the base
of each nail is called lunula,
but you have moons
of your own making,
painted on the shell of each
finger, bold for the world to behold.
Your poems, sleek and beautiful
as the hues on your hands,
move like your fingers, and I try
to figure out what it means
to be a poet whose fingertips
hush everyone silent, in awe
of what a woman of color can do.
Tourist Attraction
Come play in my graceland;
take a long, slow dip in my
reflecting pool, patriotic and
aroused all at once. Come climb
my monuments, all the way
up my arch and back down again,
for truly, I am the gateway
to the west. Take a trip to my
empire state building, where
the observation deck is always
packed, teeming with warmth
and a certain giddy dizziness
that comes with profound heights.
Tour my zoos, urban menageries full
of fins and feathers, downy nests
and botanical wonders—flora, fauna,
footprints. For you, I’m the painted
desert, the fruited plain, the streetcar,
subway, the El and tube, the English
channel and the Ivory Coast. Universal,
I’m the great adventure, rollercoaster
with so many happy loops
you scream when you finally
plunge down, get off. For you,
I’m waiting, open, no
lines at my ticket booths,
no charge at my welcome gates.
Figure Study, Reclining Female
You make me the object of your gaze,
etch me in strokes on paper, my likeness
a haunted chiaroscuro, my wary face
turned out to meet your viewer, naked
body turned for privacy, the bedspread–
our bedspread–rumpled and gathered
below my feet, tossed there as if after
consummation. I sling one arm across
my breasts, elbow out, look over my
shoulder, do not smile because a smile
will ruin this, your reckoning of me.
Instead you detail my hair, eyes,
heels, the small of my back, curves,
the bare plain terrain of my stomach.
Here our bed is documented for your
public: our pillow and mattress
slung on the floor, our walls unadorned.
You claim you adore me, that I must
stay still, pose glacial and transparent
for an etching that will hang in a gallery
hours and years from your barren studio.
Why do you not paint me with color,
make me vibrate instead of shiver,
my skin flushed pink as it actually is?
No one will know me except for this
facade, and those who see this portrait
will think me passive, submissive, far
from feminist. But to know all I am
will take more pictures than you can create,
will take a finer artist to make me live.
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