EKPHRASIS III: RACHEL OF ARLES

Here’s one, a combination of ekphrasis and a persona poem (in the voice of someone else) from my van Gogh book of poems.  [This my final post in a short series on ekphrasis.]

RACHEL OF ARLES

                                                I begin,

Vincent, to regard your closeness

in matched colors: stormy sky

blue eyes, the orange of your beard.

                        Some days you entered

full of sunflowers, those big ugly eyes

that watched while walls had ears

for the wild side.

                                    Your head

not yet a hill of bandages,

you saw how Rachels often end up empty

and whispered about a wedding of two

complementary colors.

                                                And I half-

hearing you rave late into night

about the fullness of color: how grays glow

with a bridelike blush and yellow in woodwork

wavers out and into shadows.

                                                With your scent

of turpentine, absinthe and death, you gave me

more than I bargained for.  The Christmas

you brought me the razored section

of your left ear, I turned away,

not wanting to see what wasn’t there.

-- Lenny Lianne

This poem of mine is almost thirty years old.  Though it’s gone through many revisions, the poem always has been spoken by Rachel.

Who was Rachel?  According to the brief police report printed in the Arles newspaper the day after Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his earlobe, he gave the section of ear to a certain Rachel, a prostitute. 

Vincent cut off part of his ear on Christmas Eve and gave it to Rachel as a token of himself, or perhaps as a Christmas present.

How did I come to write this poem?  When I lived in Northern Virginia, and before I started taking courses toward in MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry), I often took courses at the Washington Writers Center, now in Bethesda, Maryland.  One of those brief courses was “Nothing but Words,” taught by Rod Jellema, a fine poet and teacher.  One evening he gave a six-minute writing exercise whose instructions were:

1.     Write in the present tense.

2.     Use concrete, specific words; no abstractions

3.     Try to use all of these words:

mouth

ache (as a verb)

star

pin

strip (as a verb)

hill

trouble.

After six minutes of writing, I had the first draft of the poem which, twenty-five years and quite a few revisions later, would appear in my second book, FRENZY OF COLOR, REVERIE OF LINE.


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