Self-Portrait as an Allegory of Painting By Francine Sterle
Artemisia Gentileschi
Artemisia Gentileschi
All night an accelerating
geometry of eyes—hundreds
shaped like birds or boats
or beetles, simplified to dots
or crosses or a pair of 2s or mis-
matched diamonds, perfect zeros,
scoops of moon placed sidewise
or lengthwise on a face, slipping
out of orbit on a cheek, hung
under an ear, planted mid-forehead,
paper-thin planes of them,
each one alive and staring
from the dislocated faces of wives,
lovers, mothers, serene and lopsided,
splintered, wrenching, ravaged,
a proliferating gallery of women,
terraced in my head as I sleep,
and my own curious eye:
steering toward what it perceives,
capturing exact duplicates of each
stylized eye I run by,
as I race to comprehend
what I’m taking in, what expression
I’d see if I raised the mirror
to find my own eye, distorted
and floating above an iron cheek.