Extensions of Crash - Strophes For Frieda Kahlo
As with love, also the bellows.
Strophe 1
She could not stop there,
had to flare out, dry paint,
and the dryer flesh peel down
to bone, a sexless esqueleto*,
skull no longer mustached,
a calavera**, nothing more,
curved calcium reliant forever
upon canvas, what is congealed
there to fan and burn,
a 'cauda pavonis'**.
*Skeleton
**Skull
***Pea cock's Tail (an image in alchemy)
Strophe 2
Calavera, the Future stands
hand to mouth, fingers to forehead
unfolding before still instatic shapes.
Hold desperately to frames before
these quaking perceptions.
Strophe 3
To come to terms
with what happens
repeatedly -
16 years of age,
piercing metal violates
flesh newly woman,
turns into something
utterly astonished,
livid, unforgiving pain
burns to vapor, yet,
still, each canvas,
ever falling backward
within the cruel alchemical
vas, glass splinters
into unrelenting nerves,
encased steel-plated Virgin
takes a cyclops for a lover.
Strophe 4
To dwell more in your world,
to live in your Mexico
which does not refuse
comfort of iron nor of Grace,
always a surprise,
placed/displaced
scarring conjunction
of flesh and spirit,
humanity,
a dismembered and devoured
Christ as only incarnation allows,
insistent autonomy arguing autonomy,
rough acceptance.
Strophe 5
Discovery of the always heavy Zero,
the only Absolute of merit -
giving birth to multiplicity, diverse,
perverse, all the more irascible yet
embraceable, maddeningly erasable
while growing arms beyond counting,
the better to carry the unforgiving densities.
Gift from Arabia, the non-alloyed Zero
unmeasured by mass - a better name for god -
thermal history's twisting vector, ghostly mirage,
prima materia,
in spite of or within the Metallic Matrix,
the blacksmith heart hammers verdigris
chambers, ventricles, into shape, Newton's
grave conjugations, living time solidified,
hardened, stiffening Presence into dilute
renderings of base metal
Strophe 6
...and chaste Frieda,
canvases chasing plutonium wire,
bears the blunt end of Presence,
end of the Eon of the Fishes
barely beyond Bronze Age's just
sharpened edges fluted,
preferring obsidian ones
hacked, chipped, scraped
upon hard flint.
Frieda, volcano born,
turns into conjugal vessel,
Quetzal plume conjoined to
Serpent skin rebirthing extensions of crash,
a returning God, boat and horse
delivered from the red beard of the
bloated sea confronting yet one more
deity requiring blood.
Strophe 7
Dark Night in broad day,
all appearance
a drift beyond meaning,
only a swaying bus
careening yet again
repeating collision
of the Virgin's hymen,
amniotic Host forever a
Lover divided yet again,
Crepuscular Christi.
And Kahlo, revered now,
Woman Christ multiple-imaged -
Suffering One with breasts,
concealed antlered uterus
wincing at anviled annunciations
verified only in wavering beliefs
such are weeping statues,
surreal apparitions strung out
on coniunctio,
Gethsemani Girl seen,
no longer concealed
or hidden in plain sight,
Christ-o-form agony, isolate,
angry, raging, bereft human
confusion, despised, rejected,
meanness within us
destined to see our deities
through to the end though
beyond capacity to smell necrosis,
to see the exit wound of soul
coagulate disguised as skin,
muscle, sinew.
Strophe 8
This breaking tells.
We are
not unloved
by that,
that Rod,
and Presence
Who knows and
partakes of what
Kahlo's images
as did her
life as lived portray.
No blame.
Only stain, existent,
exquisite as the burial
cloths of the One
Rammed to a tree
suffering Divine Paternity.
Strophe 9
Circulatio.
Kahlo arrives upon the threshold of the bus
which has just, yet again, stopped at her stop
to carry her forward into Legend.
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
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