by Brett Rutherford
after the painting by Campin
Flemish Maria has been up all night
reading the sweet books her lover procured,
unruly books with their naughty pictures
of men, and of maids, and of beasts and bees,
verdigris-colored lawns and turquoise skies.
Her nurse concealed them in sewing basket
past the ever-watchful eyes of parents.
She’s read all night, and studied positions
shown in an otherwise unreadable
quarto that Hans procured from India
(he would explain everything, he told her).
Now night’s dim candle has been extinguished
to barter for study in morning's rays.
Another book, the holy one, adorns
the tabletop, but hers, she must conceal
by veiling its more lurid reds in silk.
She dreams of a Bengali gazebo,
how two bronze-banded arms might hold her tight.
Two other men watch through a latticework,
chestnut-brown eyes upon her nakedness
while she pretends to be none the wiser:
O Eros, what a great game thou playest!
To catch the light she kneels; her elbow leans
on velvet cushioning, quite unaware
of how the in-folds and out-turns of gown
have lured two peeping, immaterial ghosts.
First, Gabriel: a beardless, mincing boy,
a wingèd beauty, but no match for her.
Heaven's eunuch flaps in like a sparrow
for a chat with the studious maiden.
He tells her what God has in mind. — “Why me?”
She can’t imagine why she was chosen.
Her protests will not help — though she is not
a virgin, really — she has promised, sworn
to run off with her gentle ravisher.
“His name is Hans. He is not remotely
angelic. Odd teeth and a broken nose.
Why not choose that blond, Angelica, who
all but asks for it with her haughty name?”
But the angel babbles on about it —
his speech was all memorized, anyway.
He says she’ll be an unwitting mother,
warm hen to an invisible rooster,
then, a mother of one whose destiny
was written in stars and a prophecy.
“No, no,” she says, “I want no part of this,
and Hans would never forgive me; how could
he raise a son he did not recognize?”
Down comes Maria’s second visitor.
This one does not negotiate consent:
the ghost streaks down like molten mercury,
the tiny cross he rides like arrow-bolt
aimed straight at her womb, a battering ram.
This missile is Christ in miniature,
prefigured end already there in seed;
for her, a birth unasked-for, All-Mother-
of-Dead-Son her immortal agony.
Her eyes turn again to the outlawed book.
If she pretends she never heard the angel,
that nothing but a gadfly descended,
that a picture is worth a thousand words
of that indecipherable Sanksrit.
She sighs and thinks: That’s Hans on top, and me
on the bottom. Those chestnut eyes behind
the open latticework: watch over us!
