"Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" by Reginald Shepherd
In the painting by Guido Reni of Saint Sebastian in the Palazzo Rosso, which reproduction makes available to those who travel only on the page, the saint to be (he's not yet assumed by artifice, encumbered with perfections) endures continual martyrdom with a visual sigh, gazing almost directly upward as if to ask What now my love, or hum a chorus of Is that all there is, the body always some song or another. The eye tramping the simulacrum of a surface hands have touched can't help but note how lush the uncorrupted flesh appears: the curve, for one example, of the waist (narrowest circuit of the boy), just beneath the instance of an arrow's entrance, or the shadow just above the tangled loincloth that is surely pubic hair. One grasps that sainthood is an attribute of youth, the wondrous fair, as in old ballads; they always end. The boy in the Eagle Discount Supermarket, for another, an apparition in a backwards baseball cap appraising cuts of meat in artificial light, deciding what he can afford to buy, how much each cut costs. I love the ground on where be stands. His face? Unverifiable.
Image from the Internet |
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