The Artist Frida Kahlo
1907-1954
I Life Ends
Only once
Did she try to draw the crash
That started her 29-year death.You can make out the tram,
The bus it sliced in two,
Frida who didn't die
But lost her life,
Her broken-apart spine,
Her leg in sections,
The rod that rammed through her vagina.She couldn't finish it.
Pain she could paint
(It would be her forté)
But never this.
She's in the picture twice.Once when she was five or six
She huffed on her bedroom window
And in the steamy medium drew a door
Through which she skipped
To join a little girl, an identical self,
With whom she played.All her life she could reach out
Across the pain
To the joyous freedom of that afternoon
With her other self, the one
Who didn't ride the bus.
II Transfiguration
One of the passengers in the bus
Had bought a packet of gold-dust
That burst in the crash and flew
All over Frida.The rescue party thought
She must be a dancer,
So beautiful, painted
Red and gold.
III Eighteen, Loves Dancing
What her spine has suffered
Pins her to the horizontal
For months on end.With a frame over her bed,
And a mirror, Frida begins to learn
A painter's movements.All her life she will love to go
To dances, taking part as much
As her wounds allow.
IV Mr and Mrs Diego Rivera
'Every time he turns a corner he is moonstruck.'
For what is more lovely than a Mexican woman?
A good painter must have ravenous eyes
And if he is a normal man what else can he do?
A macho could make himself ill if he refrained.
Wives read too much into these things.Frida paints her heart as broken, bleeding,
Connected to her Diego by ribbons and veins,
As if she bears the pain of all women,
An archetype for anyone who knows
Acceptance is the only show in town.Later, when he seduces Cristina,
Her closest sister,
She fights back with the first self-portrait
In which she is shorn of her luxuriant hair.
Mannish - this is what you've made me.A first step into what she will become:
A woman in his image
With a score of lovers;
The male ones in secrecy, of course,
For Diego would kill them.No two people have the same explanation
For the divorce. It couldn't last.
She makes it a condition of the new marriage
That they will not have sex together,
Being done with sharing.
magazine list
- Features
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- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The