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James Arthur: “On a Marble Portrait Bust in Worcester, Massachusetts”

August 19, 2019 by PBQ Leave a Comment

On a Marble Portrait Bust in Worcester, Massachusetts

Someone with a careful hand
carved your center-parted hair,
which frames your forehead like a proscenium
and tumbles into ringlets
in front of either ear,

but we don’t know the sculptor’s name
or whose face
you represent, only that you were found
in the basement of a Spanish drugstore
in New York.

Classical in your proportions,
with a long, narrow nose,
you look out, pupilless, from your three quarter pose,
smiling as if to imply
that all questions of form are superfluous
and absurd. How fitting
that in your case the medium was subtracted,
not applied to a canvas
or built up word by word. Compact like a star,

with one long braid
bound behind your head. Cold, like a gun.
More absolutely pale
than any bone or shell, and your strict
hard surface sparkles in the sun.

Filed Under: Issue 99, Poetry 99

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