Homesick for Christina Olson
after Wyeth's Christina's World
he's famous for painting a lady
(though she'd never called her
self a lady)
lately come from her people's graves
a righteous riot inside the secret
intimacy of the cemetery
weeds, how she
seems to teeter on her hip but really
it's her way of scudding meanly
by herself and her plaited frame
of bone and woven limbs, rude
fingers and twisted pelvis of her some-
what diagnosed distrophy or my-
elitis she pulls herself by what grip
she can finger and widens her
strip between the farmhouse
and the grave her people wait
for her in, their days of climbing
lofts and stairs gone by
like a guest in a winter
wind a blasted sea wind a goblin
sea captain and somehow a Hathorne
(the genealogy is true through,
her mother straight through,
to then past Nathaniel who slipped
in the 'w' and dropped the spiky 'e'
to keep himself as far away from
Salem condemnation as bloody fate
and taking his Seven Gables
into fame like she, taking
as her gaze toward her own place
into fame...tell me what do you
see in seeing: Christina or
the autumn field or the farm's
barn or the three storied house
or the one or two swifts or swallows
falling in and out of the roof line
of the gable ends of the barn?
something's suggesting sky, even
if the hill rises all around her,
a pallat of autumn umbers and wind
coaxed grays. Ok, not coaxed, not
on that crop. Dictated really. This
is. This is how it's going to be. Tell
me, haven't you known women
like her, sunk under the suffering
of their ferrous, their anvil and
hammer life. And haven't you sought
to validate that skin and that bone
that waste of daily news under
the bum of the incontinent? Leave it
to Wyeth, upstairs watching her
crawl back or toward, the story's
focus is variegated as the glass he sees
her through, determined too
and willing to strip down naked
for every waving blade of grass
for every crack in the path
her hip has worn to polished clay.
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