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Elizabeth Burns

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Loving Chloë

(after Gwen John’s portrait of Chloë Boughton-Leigh)

(‘Three weeks in Paris! Will you sit for me?’)

There’s buried treasure in you
that I want to excavate,

I want to paint you the way Vermeer
painted women: to show you
still and silent in your blue-grey dress
holding a letter and your thoughts elsewhere

I want to show your gently heavy hands
the thin line of your collarbone
I want to paint the markings of your veins
the flecks of white in your hazel eyes

and then, like Vermeer
the tiny milky globes of pearls
and the gleam on the links of your necklace
bright as goldleaf

as Bronze-age torques or Roman amulets
discovered under earth

 

 

Elizabeth Burns has published Ophelia and other poems (Polygon) and The Gift of Light (diehard). A sequence, Poems from the life and art of Gwen John, is due from Galdragon Press in November 2003.

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