The portrait stood,
slightly askew and dusty
in the old building,
and its oily face
defied the dust
and the erosions
of time that took
the colours
and the memories.
I stood looking
at the face of
a young woman,
a face in which age and youth
combined to prompt
thought about
who she is or
what she was
in a time and an age
where young women
dressed to please
a man.
Was she actor or courtesan?
Was she a lady or whore?
I could not tell from
my reference point in time,
looking at her face
held in this ragged
frame of time.
But her eyes still
had their crystal glow
and strangely seemed
to speak without a voice,
and talk to my soul,
and cause my imagination
to dance and
go its playful way.
She was an actor,
I supposed,
or an actress in the
parlours of the time,
and she played roles,
and played her role
among the men
of class and the men
of means who
spent their money
and had their way.
As actress, though,
she shone above,
and lifted high,
beyond the rest,
and took Juliet
to the clouds
and Lady Macbeth
to the depths.
With her talent on display,
she caught the look,
the crafted eye
of a man of class,
a man connected,
a man of wealth
with plenty to burn
in the fires of lust.
For he wanted her
more than any other,
more than all
the rest
that strut and fret
their hour upon
the hollow stage
of regret.
He wanted her body,
he wanted the soul
that played
Gertrude and Bianca,
Celia and Desdemona,
and took the characters
beyond the ordinary,
to the special place
at the feet
of Dionysus,
the god that
savoured her art
as much as the wine.
So he took
her body
and he took her soul
and he made her his,
defying the world
and all that is
for a man of his class,
for a gentleman esteemed
and wrought in manners
and bought by the established
estate of the world.
Caught up in the
vivid colours of imagination,
I stopped a second
and looked at her eyes again,
for in one corner,
moving from one fold,
I saw the rounded
shape of a tear,
just for a second,
held precisely
and then pulled
right back again.
What was that about,
I asked myself,
in a moment of
questioning sanity
and fearing imagination
had wrought a fever
in my brain.
But there it was again,
formed as a perfect pear,
this time in the corner
of this eye and that,
and beginning to move
as a flood
filled with the colours
of the painter
commissioned
by this man of taste
so many years before.
And they ran
and they dropped
to the floor,
forming streaks
like rivers through
the makeup
of a courtesan,
in a private moment,
in a room alone.
Did she weep for her new life
or for the old one lost,
for who now would
come to play the parts
and feel the cheers
of the audience
at play’s end?
There she was
free to be all she
could be; and
possessed by no man,
she was a woman
of women,
striding out to
be seen in all
the beauty of her soul
by all eyes,
not just the ones
of the man who
wanted her body,
who took her soul.
I stood there looking
at the vivid eyes
and the tears
that seemed,
in my stupor
of imagination,
to flow.
But then my
outrageous thoughts
were stopped by
the words of a man
who came to buy
the old house,
and to seize it for the land.
“Why that old thing
has been here for
years. I remember it as
a boy. Should fetch
a penny or two.
But not worth much
at all, I think.”
“I’ll buy it,” I said,
in a flash of inspiration.
“Why would you
want that?” he said,
“It’s old, it’s dirty
and she is dead.”
As he turned away
I looked again; I looked
to those eyes,
and in them
the tears had gone
and in their stead
there seemed
to be,
in my madness,
in my romantic
stupid dream,
the hint
of a smile, and
the uttering of
the simple words,
“I will never die.”
7/9/2016