The Portrait

(written for Madame Lavender's "Personification" competition)


I have haunted her throughout her life,
hanging on walls in the silent houses
of her dreams.

She always hated me, the ineffable
dark beauty of the woman within my frame,
a most potent femme fatale whose indelible face
she would never learn a name to
nor that of the artist who painted her.

But I watched it all over the years,
watch it spread out with no particular design,
and I could feel every moment, every movement,
the hot awkward shame when she walked in suddenly
and he would be on the bed, the porn channel

on the TV with its ridiculous jingle.
She could see the voluptuous blond in the reflection
of the mirror hanging above the pillows,
the sweep of ecstasy on her pink-flushed face.
He'd make a show of being caught and
turned it hastily off, still whistling
the funk-dripped music by heart.

I knew she'd already discovered the attic a year
before, a place she both feared and yearned for.
The magazines piled high, the ones
which made the girls seem beautiful
and the ones which gave her a feeling
of softened fear in the pit of her stomach,
black bars suffocating eyes, identity
and the glint of light on chains.

But in truth she hated me because she was so drawn
to me, she was beautiful but she believed
she wasn't, could never be, not like the girl
housed within my frame, lush, fruitious,
her mouth alone capturing the quintessence
of sensual feminine mystery.

And years later she would search desperately
for my picture when she was a mother herself,
and she would find it on the net but could never identify
its origins, it was as much a dream
as her childhood, blurred at the edges,
she had to question if it was really real or not.

For I watched for years the vague impressions
that could easily dissolve upon her scrutiny,
the odd glances, accidental touchings. One night
she fell asleep in her pink nightgown
and when she awoke she was wrapped tight in his arms,
and he was whispering, "Happy birthday,
daughter, happy birthday," but it wasn't her birthday,
it was only a day like any other.

And still she sees my woman in her heart,
her liquid-black mane of hair, her promise
of pleasures of an opiate paradise.
How she wanted that woman,
wanted to be her, to taste the strange
coexistence of longing and terror.
Of power and submission.

And my woman still clings within my frame's edges,
looking out forever and into her heart,
knowing the turmoil that seethes gently within.