On a sculpture by Herbert Adams

Modern Age, Wntr, 2009 by James Matthew Wilson

American Beauty Exhibition, National Gallery, Dublin, 2002

                       I

The precise anger in your eyes, last night,
Seemed for the first time and, perhaps, the last,
To cut through every fold of charm, and sight
In me the wrinkled cloths and ragged past.
"For too long now," you said, "I've thought you were
Not perfect but, at least, what you said you were."

This afternoon, expatriated from
Our homes, our images, our veritable selves,
We neither speak nor touch. The gallery's hum
Of scrubbed dry air, and the exhibited wealths
Preserve our silence: artificial world,
Where what you said distills, abstract and cold.

You stare at the volcanic Cotopaxi,
Those oils flooding toward apocalypse.
But that, or any sublime scene, turns warily
On our few months abroad as they collapse.
I go--from work to work, continue down,
Till my thoughts rest upon a girl of stone:

                    II

Her marble eyes, up close, are clumsy things,
Vertical scratches form an iris, light
Brushwork of paint upon them browns to bring
Definition amid the consummate
Polish of a pale and laminant cheek,
Whose model sat for Adams one snow-locked week.

But from a middle-distance, eye and neck,
Flowering cheek and pied jewelry,
Her unmoved glistening lips seem to enact,
In cold perfection, warm reality.
Did that young lady on her sculpture stare
Preferring it to her face in a mirror?

This piece, some fifty others from Detroit,
Like us have come to Dublin for a time,
And looking on them here gives each a slight
Neighborly kinship we would never find
If we walked by them in that old museum's
Brusque familiarity of home.

                  III

For Adams and his peers the trade of art
Must itself have seemed an imported idea:
Imposing, calcified in unseen thoughts
Of thorned peaks of the Swiss Alps rupturing far
Above the folded skin of clouds. They ripened
Borrowed fantasies to an archetype.

That Boston heiress gathered up the lot
To furnish her covenant of Italian stone.
Her gardens flourish near old pictures bought
From needy seigneurs in a rotting Rome.
For that servile gift she will be ever praised
Though Rembrandt hasn't yet been "naturalized."

Cross town, this genteel figure held her pose
Till all the academic strains of time
Had found, in Adams' hand, a tense repose.
His predecessors helped him see a line
(At least he hoped) in what seemed living flesh,
And haunted his work into consciousness.

Most difficult work is undergone in fear
Of some misunderstood authority
Whose echoing voice, despite itself, doesn't tear
Obedience from originality:
The distance of a carpet's breadth or sea's
Leaves room for brilliance in naivete.

                   IV

And yet, on this isle more than any other,
Remembering the five pounds Victoria gave,
And how she came, a blind and ruffled visitor,
But once, carried above the hungry graves,
I know that a small channel's distance lends
Space enough for a murderous ignorance.

The woman standing by me now, as we
Stare on an ageless face whose model has
Long ago passed into her grave, may be
The one who fashioned my best self from ash.
She trusted my words and her eyes to see
What only is while wish meets novelty.
I don't, for that, dare touch her idle hand,
Or peer again into that emptied eye,
But wonder why we come to understand
What grips us more than other passersby
As disappointing just because it held
Our stare longer than casual stares are held.

Adams knew as much and made his girl
Upon a high and ornate pedestal
Till set off, bodiless, from a wandering world
She seemed but scarcely individual.
And yet I love her painted uncombed hair
Because, I found some imperfection there.

I've often tried to hold an endless breath
Between a dawning thought and dimmed regret:
As love and hate, to shirk a candid death,
Must idle as they can at middle-distance,
By chance discovering what we all must know:
That intimate knowledge comes as a sudden blow.

JAMES MATTHEW WILSON is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University and contributes reviews, poems, and essays to many publications, including the Intercollegiate Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, and Pleiades, among others.