Girl and Friends View Naked Goddess
after Pier Celestino Gilardi’s painting A Visit to the Gallery
She’d rather be nude, she’d rather be dressed,
rather cover up her bum and breasts.
If she dropped her clothes would she look like this?
A sculpted goddess, bare as an almond?
Her girlfriends buzz about those goddess tits,
though the shy one stares straight ahead—stunned
to see what she might become. What might
the goddess become if she could untighten
her gaze and be part of her watchers’ scene?
Ruffled, laced, stockinged and corsetted,
this girl’s dying to shed it all; a sheen
of longing on her face asks, “Can’t I be rid
of my stays?” But the object she’d become
would have to stay in the hall alone
in the clammy gloom of every Roman night…
Goddess, her ideal, may you not feel
or have to possess a soul…Let that light
inside these girls, who’ll dash down the hall
with arms linked, out for a bite to eat and
lots of gossip at their visit’s end
(for now they’ve seen her, and she’s inside them,
a man’s ideal, and they see they could be she,
the naked lady of a sculptor’s whim,
cold as the floors they walk on), let that light glow.
May they dress up daily, may their servants stir
hot washtubs of bloody cotton strips to insure
they won’t bleed on their taffetas. May they laugh
at a man inserting his soul in a sculpture.
May the sculpture not feel it intrude there,
and chafe. And may her observers have futures.
—Molly Peacock
This poem is from Molly Peacock’s collection The Second Blush. I worked with Molly when I was in graduate school and she is just one of the most amazing people. She’s eccentric in a theatrical way, but not in a fake, putting-you-on way. She’s one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met and she pushed me to new limits in my writing. Even before I worked with her and got to know her personally, I would see her around campus and listen to her lectures and I always hoped to know as much about literature and writing as Molly Peacock. The semester I worked with her I finished a traditional masters thesis and wrote more creatively than I ever had in one time span. It was amazing.
And that’s why I wanted to share one of her poems with you. I’ve loved this poem for a while now, perhaps because I could be one of the girls looking at the sculpture or because I am an artist who inserts my soul into my art. (And my art never chafes.) The ladies in the painting are actually from the 19th century, which isn’t something you have to know to enjoy this poem, though it adds a bit of depth to the implications. You can view the painting online here. I think what I appreciate most about Peacock’s poetry, though, is how much work goes into the writing. This poem has form and meter and rhyme and innuendo that keeps me as a reader wanting more and as a writer wanting to hone her skills. I can just see Molly as she sat and studied Gilardi’s painting, wearing a fantastic scarf and a half grin as she molded this poem. It’s fantastic.
-S
