Double Exposure
Meditation on Summer Day from Edvard Munch’s Linde Frieze
Munch, commissioned to paint
a sweet seascape—sunny
Asgardstrand—to please
the sensibilities of children:
rolling gentle horizons,
measured sweep of kindly sea,
gleaming white triangulations
of brilliant sails, and certainly, no
offensive human actors to clutter up
the scenery—“no lovers kissing…
children know nothing of such things.”
Did the offended artist know
he superimposed a scrim over holiday
and fancy, shattering serenity?
The accidental couple, spectral shapes
seeping through the gouache
of the artist’s eye,
transparent lover binding
his black-eyed bride
to the vertical mast of pine,
its flap of green sails futile
across the windless plane.
Invasive in one corner,
impasto oval blond,
ingenuous, eyeless witness
to predator and purple anguish.
Realities vacillate: beside
beach, sun, sea, and sails,
a cone of faceless girls,
black back of a blank man’s head,
intrusive clutch, or worse,
dark intimacies. The artless veneer
of image defies the eye: which
is surface, which substance?
Palimpsest or leakage?
Madonna
Meditation on Edvard Munch’s Madonna
Madonna of the red halo:
white moon shadows glaze her face,
eyes closed against dark;
lips, crimson as fruit,
sealed against desire;
arms fading into umber haze.
Eve to apple, hallowed fire:
eat of me: ripe woman body,
blood, breasts that suckle
a wolfish world, cryptic
smile barring sin.
Crucifixion:
apple white of ancient moonlight,
arms fastened to a tree,
dogwood, apple, rose, red gall,
pierced, openings
close on intimacy.
Mouths choke on repast,
lips on words:
It is consummated.
Fruit, forbidden in the garden,
ferments into wine, wine
into sacrifice.
Virgin waits: echoes
of the bridegroom
at the closed gate,
walls for the climbing rose;
candles flicker, moonlight
wanes to the hem of dawn.
Cordelia Hanemann is currently a practicing writer and artist in Raleigh, NC. She has published in numerous journals including Turtle Island Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Dual Coast Magazine, and Laurel Review; anthologies, The Well-Versed Reader, Heron Clan VI and Kakalak 2018 and in her own chapbook, Through a Glass Darkly. Her poem, “photo-op” was a finalist in the Poems of Resistance competition at Sable Press and her poem “Cezanne’s Apples” was nominated for a Pushcart. Recently the featured poet for Negative Capability Press and The Alexandria Quarterly, she is now working on a first novel, about her roots in Cajun Louisiana.
