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Figure in Landscape
作者Author  /  Bin  Ramke  

Figure in Landscape 

 
 
 
  The air was full of summer 
and boys hurried to leave their sisters behind 
as rudely as possible.  Typical of home, 
the helpful enmities of light and shade, 
like the chiaroscuro on velvet 
in those powerful paintings of famous saviors: 
art is the mere manipulation of memory, after all. 

It was a typical home, and the helpful 
enmities of light and dark helped 
fill the dutiful days of the wife, 
the sleepy ignorance of the husband, 
and the vigilant white-stoned fears of the children: 
(consider the story of dark will versus lively intent, 
the story of pathos and simple pleasure 
derived from small events in a small town 
several miles inland, full of mosquitoes 
and rain, like afternoon television. 

The story includes such scenes 
as the changing line of lights, 
the traffic lights on a Sunday evening 
reflected in the rainy streets, 
and other emblems of despair). 
But since art is merely manipulation 
after all, she watches her husband 
at three in the morning sleeping, 

she, having been abandoned by brothers, 
a mother and a father, the System, 
left alone with herself and her self, 
her simple, memorable self, in the night 
knows there is nothing to do but remember 
and feel the flesh of one's own thigh 
and wonder whether it is disease 
made you what you are, or else 

you take a warm bath and have a drink. 
If you remember Art you remember men 
watching women bathe, 
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 
for instance, and the forty-eight years 
between his single, torque-driven bather, 
her broad back, and the later Turkish bath 
of many women as if through a keyhole. 
Or Delacroix, those Rirkish women bathed 
in the woods, or Chassoriau, 
whose bather sleeps like Gretel, 
abandoned by her brother, too, 
in the woods.  Or Corot, that simple man, 

whose naked bather ("La Thilettel" 1859) 
brought her hairdresser along under the leafy 
languorous larches.  You can find 
Spanish bathers by de la Peiia, 
and any number ("The Woman in the Waves", 
"Bathers," "Bather Sleeping by a Brook") 
by Courbet.  Even Millet's Goose Girl 
has a naked left heel cooling in the pond. 
Gerome, Bazile, Degas, Gleyre, Renoir, 
Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin, Cezanne, 
and Guillaume-Adolphe Bouguereau, 
all these men imagined women bathing 
indoors and out, even seeing 
these naked bathers sleeping, open air, 
closed in their own memories 
for the dangerous delight of men. 
But what memory does she suffer, our wife, 
bathing at three A.M., following her shining 
way back into the dark wood? 

The breast which emerged in sunlight 
curves like limestone beneath her sleeplessness. 
Driftings of forgetfulness descend 
like shells of small animals to fit 
the shape of ocean floor, or the vitreous 
shape of the bathtub, white and domestic.
 

 
   
The poem is from The Erotic Light of Gardens (Wesleyan Poetry: 1989).
All Rights. Used with permission by Wesleyan University Press, 2002
   
 
   
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