Richard Kenney

Madonna in Blue
May 22, 2019 Kenney Richard

Madonna in Blue
 
 
An aneurism in the sun, a gravity-wave.
A beating of rainbows against the window pane.
The angel, a lunge, an ejaculation of lilies, kneels,
knowing. Nods past her upstretched palm: he knows.
 
Against her will her womb suborned by a god,
incubating a future so far-fetched and odd
how could its knowledge from its power culled
but show? Her pose: a cobalt spring recoiled.
 
And what should a watching voyeur feel then? Rage?
The Ovidian horror? Again the seized girl, again Kore
covered by ungoverned god, as known is by strange,
as Past by Future—this one, where there are no angels,
no seraphim but us, its mobbing choir?
What happened? Didn’t the painter’s brush catch fire?

Richard Kenney teaches at the University of Washington. His most recent book is The One-Strand River (Knopf, 2008). His newest book, Terminator, is due out in October 2019, also from Knopf.