Posing For Ophelia
He wants to see how a woman looks when she is drowning.
This poem is an ekphrastic poem, which is a fancy Greek-inspired word for a poem that was inspired by a painting. The particular painting that inspired this poem is Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais. Ophelia was a character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and she drowned in a river.
The poem’s focus is not so much on Ophelia herself as the young woman who was the model for Millais’s 1850’s painting - a young woman of nineteen named Elizabeth Siddall. I was intrigued by her story, and it is through her eyes that I wrote this poem, imagining the solidarity of sisterhood that arises between her story and Ophelia’s. You can read more about the story of this painting here.
Posing For Ophelia
Back in time
in a second hand dress,
I am a painter’s muse
underwater, I am Ophelia
drowning.
Close your eyes
a little more.
His voice, hoarse with absorption,
echoes the rasp
of the brush on the canvas,
shadows fill my eyelids
but I can still see his hands,
the silver stem of the poppy
in her fingers, its skin
of red velvet.
Closing my eyes
is what I know.
The water cups the edges
of my face, it is gentle as a mother
and bleak as midwinter
for the fire has gone out, but
he does not notice and I
am used to the cold.
Her hands float empty, the dress
lifts from her skin in a faraway embrace
of silk and salt,
he wants to see
how a woman looks
when she is drowning.
Who was I
before this room,
before this costume of yesterdays,
before the hatmaker’s shop,
before the summer
that named me?
Hands touching
through time and water, Ophelia,
you drowned your hope
in a river,
I keep mine alive as a fig in winter, waiting
for the tree to become
the carnelian this wineskin
was born for, but while I wait
I am only
becoming older
and cold.
It is a two-dog night
in this river and we
are alone.
-S. Rochelle
photo credit: Pixabay
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