For John William Waterhouse
The Lady of Shalott hangs above my headboard
reminds me that marveling in pre-Raphaelite
mirrors has its price since living in reflections
drains the imagination…cripples one’s character;
each night I weave fanciful imagery in my head
empowered by intensity sustained by longing
urged on through an acute appreciation of details,
metaphors, similes and unadulterated language;
come dawn my eyelids have become as tightly drawn
as a window shade deflecting morning rays of light ;
thereupon I hearing Orpheus pluck strings on his lyre
charming me from bed, embracing the day.
Sing to me Waterhouse, you whose paintings
bathe viewers with visions of rapture and repose
as colors coalesce textured sights emergence
from Echo and Narcissus to Jason and Medea,
Hylas and the Nymphs, to Ulysses and the Sirens,
your bring mythic Greek heroes/sheroes to life
with a brush, immortalizing their exploits and trysts
in a cavalcade of pigments stretched across each
canvas where light and shade create optical movement
that captivate my lazy eyes revealing clues that flush
each character’s dilemma with new found mystery,
urging me to “gather ye rosebuds” while facing adversity.
Cruelty to compassion, apprehension to exaltation,
you reenact classic moments when human nature
overcame reason and tempted fate. With academic acuity
you interpret curiosity with Pandora’s persistence
study virtue and vice through metachromatic hues,
flowing fabrics, symbolic transience, leaving Circe to her
sorrow, Miranda to new worlds, Penelope to her suitors,
Ophelia to her madness, and Cleopatra to her beauty,
her lovers, her ambition—her unsung vulnerability.
I bow to you Waterhouse, whose melancholic
masterpieces still inspire fertile minds and reinvent
rainbows for art enthusiasts and aesthetic painters.
