I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best.
—Frida Kahlo
She is learning it, how to foreground, she is cathedral-large and
stepping out of frame, out of time, the bed she swims and swims.
Swims the avenue, past the bent-waist jacarandas, November
bloomless, barred windows, shuttered doors. Black glass, solid wood.
Swims palest sky. In the early watercolor even the bells close up the
belfry. No needles of light, no palm of God. Somewhere else, deer lick
the snow. A river birch hand-trained miniature. Whelks hanging, in
deep water, their ghost-spirals of eggs. But her world is here, mirror
and sable brush, canopy of no stars, her face and face—reflected her
crown of eyebrows, strict part. Also, boundless acreage. The Necaxa
River dammed and 10,000 miles of track. Order and progress and the
streetcar at full speed. Its rails trace the border she paints. Passes
through her, almost. She’s not whittling the chambered days but
walking out of them, from the aggregate of history, she is turning her
back to all of that, the Porfiriato, her room like a lung. No, look, she is
turning toward—
Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, and Reader, I. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.
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