Slightly bruised around the edges, lush
and ripe, you are quite ready to be taken
like fresh fruit in a basket, but a hush
has overtaken you, as if forsaken.
When I describe the way that you appear
to me I wonder why you aren’t amused.
If my description of you were austere
perhaps your feelings would not have been bruised.
I won’t dwell on the flaws around your edges;
to mention them I know is very wrong;
invested in you, like a fund that hedges,
I won’t go short on you, for whom I long.
Christopher Knight writes about an exhibition of the work of Rembrandt and Caravaggio in Amsterdam (“Principals in a pageant of painting, ” LA Times, March 26,2006) . Describing a Caravaggio painting, “ he Boy With a Basket, ” Mario Minitti, a Sicilian painter who was the artist’s lover, Knight writes:
The lighting is fairly described as histrionic, and the young man––costumed, coiffed, and carrying a prop–emotes to the painting’s intended audience-of-one like an actor on a stage. Like something out of Playgirl magazine, with his off-the-shoulder robe and gentle swoon, he offers himself to a viewer like a basket of fruit; ripe, lush, slightly bruised around the edges, ready to be taken.
3/27/06
gershon hepner
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/slightly-bruised/
