Diptych
I’m hammering nails into the stretchers,
oblivious to the white-fleshed seated nude,
crowned with yellow-white hair, her upward
gaze from the model’s chair, red flowers
at her side and a white haze behind, unaware
that she exists only a few feet high and wide,
an emotional world unto itself, on canvas,
like to the cross, nailed in forever.
She, on the cusp of aging, poised
in a room of hydrangeas and gauze,
awkward in her painted innocence,
expectancy in the uplifted eye
from her bamboo chair, red flowers beside,
light, internal or fluorescent, in a haze
of sunlight, she, fragile as oyster flesh,
while I nail the frame to lift her into the room.
