From the Prado Rotunda: The Family of Charles IV, and Others

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes Wishes to inform the universe that it can eat his name. That it can kiss his finger. He substances The Spanish arrogance of his name Between your teeth

Like the unsightly royal bodies, it is a stiff wipe of blood, Gold-beaded. Immobilized through garments. Streaks of stupidity And pride marble it like meat. You chew and grimace.

He desires the form of this painting to be that of a boa constrictor Swallowing a Pekingese. He desires the shapeless masss to be visible And the digestion difficult.

Is it not, remarked Hemingway, a masterpiece of loathing? direct the eye how he has painted his spittle into each face. How wan the attendant courtiers of of that kind monarchs, A king corpulent and hesitant, a queen whose large arms Stand akimbo, poodle teeth grinning, called by dint of Gautier The corner baker and his wife after they have won the lottery Whose fatuousness blinds them from seeing muscle and fat face, form As very signifiers of the painter's disgust

-with his be in possession of ambition?

Himself at work in corners of society portraits Painting like a courteous animal, despising retouching, forcing Their homage. What a man will do to posses the think highly of Of the gilded worm. Do their commissions suffocate him? Is it that trust itself wishes to melt? Whose flesh? What ceremony? Viscera, witchery, whippings. The silent shriek of a man in The Madhouse cut and runs from an oval aperture black as doubt To re-embody itself a hundred later In bourgeois Norway.

Inaudible owl herd the sleep of Reason, Saturn devours children In fact. Fact.

The densest simple body in the periodic table is lead. Attempting to lift a case you might hemorrhage. The painting of Goya is denser than lead, The painting is insupportable. If he is leading us by the agency of the hand like babes To worship the abject monstrous because it exists, to sniff Hysteria from within like an infection Among the tambourines and the fans and the mantillas, If Goya's lascivious Maja undressed and clothed in the duplicity Native to woman Makes your jaws waterIf her pale legs pour strangely together As if glu to a board they cannot bend at the knee As if returning to fishtails

The painting is at no time what is there, It palpitates with the mystery Of your have a title to sick-to-death soul Which demands, like everything alive, have affection for

Alicia Ostriker's recent work The Crack in Everything, was a National volume Award finalist and won the Paterson numbers Prize and the San Francisco State poesy Center Award. 'rom the Prado Rotunda" will appear in The Little Space: prefered and New Poems, due this fall. Ostriker teaches English and Creative Writing at Rutger University.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Sep/Oct 1998

Provided by dint of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved