After Robert Browning
That’s my last Duke peering down the parapet
With his councilor breaking out in a cold sweat,
As he shows off his Frà Pandolf, his Brancusi,
Sculptures he neither made nor bought. Boozy
With inheritance, his orchards full of cherry
Trees stay well-tended, his banquet-tables merry
With goblets and grape-leaves stuffed with pork;
Conjuring the smell of duck roast makes me retch.
Thankfully I would have been made to fetch
Linens or flutes and would dally in the kitchen
Galley with simmering pots, never to pitch in,
Mind you, that would reek of liberal entitlement,
But rather to vex John Locke’s enlightenment
And dream of a hocking a loogie into the soup.
My raison d’être? Breasts that wouldn’t droop
And managing the arrangement of piano sheet
Music and staying silent, demure, agreeable, neat
In appearance, always deferent to the mighty
Duke, who lent me his name. But I’m Aphrodite,
Not a 1650’s housewife. My smile is my shield
Against—how should I put it?—what men wield
Implicitly and arrogantly as biological right,
Providing us the stale binary of fight or flight—
I chose the latter. See you later. Let him give
Commands to someone as secretly combative
As his staff, whose names, and children’s names
I know (not he), the one person who blames
Herself less than a flower. Yes, a faint half-flush
Springs from my throat, lilies from a paintbrush—
Monet’s, or an Edo Period master of ukiyoe’s
Lacquer-tinted woodblock prints of kabuki shows:
A transitory, infinitely sorrowful, floating world
Captured so perfectly wistful in a smile unfurled,
Though he failed to notice, it was never the same
Smile—sometimes it conspired to hide the shame
Of being disregarded or ogled again, other times
It curled contemptuously, plotting horrible crimes;
Rarely it struggled to comply or brazenly to flirt,
More often, offered casually as an untucked shirt.
Ironically, it was never a Duchenne smile—which,
Wife of a Duke and all—and still makes me twitch
To remember the last grin to crinkle the corners
Of my eyes with crow’s feet. Not a foreigner’s
Sense of having dreamt a destination before a trip,
But a leaf’s recall of once being a seed. Ownership
Is fiction, but there he is showing off his bronze
Neptune taming a seahorse and his stuffed swans,
The coat of arms with his nine-hundred-year-old
Name. Just ignore the trace and smell of mold
Never quite rubbed away fully with linen cloth.
Imagine once I was stuck in his jar like a moth,
And now I finger potter’s clay instead of sapphire
Cluster earrings and build my own roaring bonfire
On the beach where I scissor with a scullery maid—
No one will ever convince me I should have stayed.
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