Artfully arranged arrows engorge hidden quivers
she carries, everywhere she goes. Each day registers
as a clarion call to the hunt. Javelins are squirreled
away for special hunt days. The self-generated mystique
of the girl warrior magus makes others nervous.
What makes it onto canvas— Spanish-colored visions
of child-like dilapidation, children blankly born into
the special dwarf dodo dance the human race does— takes,
transcendentalizes violence into a vision quest for the most
morose human truth, tripping eyes into realizations of
deep, absurd diminutions. This is a woman unused to
conventions, around that word (love) which cannot appear
in her paintings, themselves sharp like javelins. Her eyes
cannot be anything but green, but her carnivore streak is pure earth.
I cannot deign to speak of where, how, why she was raised,
except to say that what was needy in her crystallized as
her most precious asset. The child in her cannot die.
That the special circumstance is not a coincidence—
the analogous morose days I spent in Bethesda in my
own childhood, dragged unwillingly by those I
had no idea were adversaries into a matrix, corrupt
in its tininess, lying in all directions to cover up
stunted, blunt motives— can remain in the grave
where it belongs. It’s all too sad. But transmuting
sadness into anger, anger into representational panache,
is what this Diana does best. She, too, would look
ravishing at the center of the Great Stair Hall.
And could laugh, here and there, at the whole thing. Between shots.
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