Plain Lisa

For Alice Quinn

See that when you are drawing and make a

beginning of a line, that you look over

all the object that you are drawing for any

detail whatever which lies in the direction

of the line that you have begun.

Leonardo Da Vinci, NOTEBOOKS

I

Leonardo's studio! who wouldn't smile to be a jot

in all that litter? Four corners are not enough;

one couldn't see its corners for the world.

Each time it takes a while for my eyes

to settle-so much to see-the planned obscurity

widening the pupil to take in the giant wing-frames

on the wall and tubes to spy on the sky or magnify

the joints of flies and the split human head

tabled with its tongue-loll and all

the pretty boys, lutanists, the tame doe,

jesters, caged doves and fountain-fall.

Luckily Francesco

doesn't object to the rainy afternoons or evenings

Leonardo chooses to have me pose,

and I don't mind getting out of the house.

By now I'm used to the dissections

in mid-sitting when he throws down the brush, takes up

the knife

and opens some ear or elbow, slices with such care to

bare

bone past mauve muscle, fingers a taut white

tendon, exposes a connection.

Or, back to the eyes, one of the boys under instruction

spreads the dead lids to insert his fingers as if

pinching a plum from a tart and slowly pulls the soft

ball out,

spits to glisten it, slowly rolls it

in the candlelight while the Master stares

and stares to get his reflections right.

The focus must be everywhere. Some say

he's a little crazy. I don't know.

I wonder-he has such a way

with fog, and rain comes naturally to him

as to a father-I wonder:

did he invent just his forecaster or the very weather?

Anyway, he made up a formula

for proofing our capes against it.

He hasn't got it right yet and I still get soaked

attending the days he opts for-but no matter-

it's the thought that counts.

I have to smile.

u

When I agreed to this I didn't know how

long he'd keep me sitting on the edge of my chair

and now it's been four years-the odd thing is the longer

he goes on the more there's left to do.

More things keep coming into it, you see-

it's not just the portrait for the blank space Francesco

wants to fill on our dining room wall, it's-well-

it's what we talk about and the background

music and everything seems so important somehow

when l'm there I feel-I feel I help him keep some secret

in reserve-it's not good to have it

all at once you know.

And what is the use of hurry

when perfection is made of the perfect putting off,

the conclusive inconclusions as when the viol

and voice might stop but then again

might trade and vary the phrase, go on...

So we go on.

Sometimes for days I can't get the music out of my head

with its funny hesitations-or something he's said.

He tells me riddles, jokes, philosophy, fables, makes

me know

I am only one among a number

of experiments, my random chatter just another raw

material, and I don't mind, just so

my ductility doesn't go too much to his head.

He keeps having this same dream-keeps asking me

what more than curiosity

one needs to light the lights in the natural caverns

of the brain. Now how should I know

if he doesn't? He asks a woman as if he thinks

a woman thinks. Ah, how Francesco

would laugh at the thought.

And what is it, thought? To me a feel of things,

tears thrice distilled perhaps and penetrating

with a bite like acid, the mind. Sometimes it seems to

start

in the tongue, in the muscle far back, a sprout, a need

to feed and be fed by the yet to be invented

labials, sibilants, fricatives, liquids

and the num num nums that are our gods.

Just words.

The analysis never ends and the neverendingness

is comforting, the final catch in fact. In fact there is

so much going on, I try to look everywhere

at once, I try to be plain, to look beautiful . . .

and all at once you know.

I

I have a knack for silly notions. He smiles.

I smile.

"Stop it, Lisa, I can't paint with the stupid light

on your teeth-it glitters, it's animal."

This is serious business, after all, we musn't commit

the sin of explicit pleasure.

I think this is what he means-not to think

but be-a bit amused in being resigned a bit

designing but quite sure of nothing.

I am sure of it.

Yet at the beginning the Master was not

fond of my mourning my child.

He wants me to pay attention to the abandoned

one in him I guess. I am a plain person.

"Madonna," he mutters, "Madonna Madonna Madonna,

when will you learn?" I wish he would be more plain..

Does he want to make me another?

I don't know.

where twilight is the perfect light

where shadows are a kind of wine

pale iris is my flower

most Florentine and my hands that feed

the tame white doe white bread between

the hours of sitting still and still

still sitting still

with saintly Sister Camilla my friend

in the corner mumbling a prayer

who thinks we are unholy

for all I know and this is a thought

for a twilight where

I get to resemble my portrait more and more

and each dim day I sit to him I feel him looking more

out of my eyes and I look out

of his at the shipwrecks and Cyprian calm,

mechanics, planets, poisons, caverns of questions

and fear and I am afraid

I may not be following but I am plainly

more curious than ever as he treats me

like one of the boys, tells me . . . but about some things

I keep my mouth shut.

IV

It wasn't long ago.

One night and all the candles lit,

outside a storm coming on-best light-

and as I sit a bolt upright pain shoots straight

across the tender roof of my mouth up through

my ear and I nearly join

the fresh corpses stacked in the corner.

And that was it.

The teeth out and my mouth no longer

salty with blood I sit again but

"the perfect lines are gone-your jaw's all wrong."

He searches in the beggars' slack mouth-holes, extracts

three gross hunks of calcium

to replace my lost ones, files down and fastens them

with copper bands to my gums. Ingenious.

I taste fresh death, the rot, just cooled.

A vulgar taste, the taste of Art. The living end.

Except for the pain, I would have smiled.

Is there any bridge he wouldn't try to build?

Francesco of course refuses to pay for something so

unfinishable and dull.

I grin an empty grin when I see the empty wall.

Four years in place in his place

in my place... it wouldn't do.

When Leonardo left for France he took me with him.

I have to smile.