Superheroines in the Living Room: Comics
Weight on the ball of her right foot, inky
wedge heel just barely brushing the tiled floor,
the woman's left toe thrusts forward. Boot shaft
climbs from ankle to knee. A dark extension
reaches mid-thigh, where purple unitard
emerges, sparkles past fingers enclosed
in black gloves that sheath forearms, elbows.
Light bouncing from the lamp stand on her left
rims her near breast, casting shadows across
her chest. Draped over her slanted shoulders,
brunette ponytail merges with the dark.
Face half-hidden, Catwoman regards us
with a cool challenge, but portraits climbing
the wall behind her reek of normalcy:
toddlers, family groups, senior portraits.
The decor is tastefully restrained:
potted plants, blue-and-white vase in fish-shape,
its mouth gaping. This is hardly the lair
of a villain. And why would she bother
to trespass in such a place with no jewels,
diamonds, super-secret weapons to steal?
She couldn't be the daughter in one of those pix.
Antiheroes don't spring from such plain roots.
Copyright © 2011 by Anthony W. Artuso
Dear Tony,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your poems and think they're well written. I'm a big fan of ekphrasis. It has always seemed to me that the device brings a physical medium into the literary as a means of distraction or transition. It's classical use is almost like an ancient form of stream of consciousness - just like how the inner thoughts and emotions of Woolf's characters in the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway are interrupted by the presence of a plane over London as it writes out a message in the sky, and the narration's movement to this physical object flows seamlessly but deceptively away from the literary. I think, perhaps, I'm inclined to interpret everything this way on account of Catullus' over-the-top use of the ekphratic tool in his poem 64. I like that the true ekphrasis in your poems is not the minute reconstruction of the pictures, but the movement away from them towards the distraction. It's something about the poem's ability to bring the thought to life and then to interrupt this very birth with the imposition of the image that makes the ekphrasis so tantalizing and mysteriously more like the human mind itself.
Hope to read more.
*Its
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