Pierantonio on Being Married to Artemisia Gentileschi the Night She Dances the Ballet: War of Beauty War of Love, 1612
You broke through a bouquet
of arteries, barked alla luna, plucked it
from the sky, then swallowed whole. Your toes
could break Florence. You writhe nauseous
against the silhouette of Santa Croce,
become your arms fettered into atriums, swell
with all the images you can hold: the Sunday walls
behind you, fading slack; your regurgitated moon
popped upon the canvas, rolling chestnut
spotlight. Your city dissolves. The country inside you
dissolves. Drawing is the battering
of your toes on this pavement,
the lines of this church haunting
the night with its two dimensions.
When we got married, I thought:
I didn’t buy much. Brunt of scandal, mired
in mud, I didn’t spend, risked
nothing. Still, I am an empire of debt, a tower
of bright cerulean silk and tenderized meat. We are
no new republic. We spent above our share.
The horses that brought us here
are dead. I look inside myself and all I see
is the outside of myself: my skin, my hair.
I look inside you and I see the bowels
of littered canvases, a paint brush strung
through the belly of a bow, aimed above this sty
of a red-tide poison palette, fixing
to ignite the gods.
