Painting on Silk: Some notes on Process
I’ve included another poem here, and I want to talk about the process for writing this one. This one is in response to another story about a man who falls in love with a geisha girl and after she dies fairly young, he cannot seem to get over her. He dreams of her, and one night after having a dream of her, he paints her portrait on a silk panel (hence the title of this poem).
After reading the outline of this story, several things came to mind; I thought about how the arts are a way of voicing something that we cannot voice in everyday speech; I have not experienced the same feeling of loss that this story describes, as it refers to losing someone to death, but I thought about what images can be used to describe losing love. I have been starting several poems recently with a sort of broad statement; for this poem, that’s “Art bares the beauty that we cannot speak.” I wanted to bring in the word ‘bare’ because of the play on ‘bear,’ and to show that this lost love and the feeling of losing a loved one is made apparent in this silk portrait in the story. So, the beauty that the speaker in the poem cannot bear is the loss of this young lover, who is the story is a geisha. I wanted to play around with this idea of painting because I thought it was interesting that the young geisha paints her face, and it is also through painting that this man deals with the loss of this woman. This portrait both connects him to this woman and helps her get over her, which is what I am trying to convey in the last few lines of this poem.
I am also working with a variation of the sonnet here, which I felt was appropriate given the subject matter.
Painting on Silk
after “The Ghost of Oyuki”
Art bares the beauty that we cannot speak.
The losing you young, my painted woman.
I wake mornings, your face still there from dreams
left undone by the waking without you.
I paint what I remember to forget
the way you brushed your face with white, careful
with the curved lines at the nape of your neck.
To paint is to know the layers up-close,
the brushstrokes of brown that shadow your hair
against your brow; the curve of your lips, down.
I stand back to make sense of the lines there
on the silk. To understand your body
from a distance never practiced before.
The distance between bare brushstrokes and form.