The Venus Effect

by John D. Kelly

after The Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez

Feather-light fingers flap, ruffle. They arch like

the tips of my wings. My quills are in a swan's way.

A Frenchman's gloved hands. White shadows

on a curtain of velvety blackness. A stage. A silent

movie miming the fantasy of a Bolshoi Ballet.

A black pen flying, gliding then landing − splashing

into the inky murk of an artificial lake in Combray.

Watch me closely. For once I’m without my bow.

The ghosts of a Beatle and no less than three

marvellous Marcels invoke more than the Spaniard

in this work. Umbras and penumbras caress you

They overlap inside you, plumb the very depth of you.

Can you sense them? Can you feel them

in the wings − in the shadows within passages

of lost time played out in mimed motion

hidden, much too long, in the lamp-black darkness?

Let your involuntary memory snag 

on the lead-laced impasto of an old coloured palette.

Let the medium of linseed oil and turpentine conjure up

the acrid smell of gasoline that once filtered through

your nostril hair. Time to be away in a bus with Bishop

and that female moose. You’ll see Duchamp at his work,

taking the piss again with a porcelain fountain before

charging his brush to begin to paint a naked muse frozen,

a multi-facetted woman descending a staircase again and

again in a futuristic haste while a crystal-clear hourglass

form, safe-set in fine-turned cherry-wood, shares all

its sterile cubist ore through a conjoined neck − a waist.

Those grains of sand are, again, my silvered looking-

glass. They have melted and fused, once more, in a heat

as hot as was Her embrace when Diego asked me to cast

that glance from Venus back, to also paint Her face.