The Making Love of Art

An assignment in my Advanced Creative Writing workshop this week was to combine two favorite works or literature and turn them into a new original poem. They didn't have to be poems--they could be short stories, novels, etc. I asked my professor if I could use a poem and a painting. She approved.

As soon as I heard the assignment I immediately thought of one of my favorite poems, Recovery of Sexual Desire After a Bad Cold by Fred Chappell:

Toward morning I dreamed of the Ace of Spades reversed
And woke up giggling.
New presence in the bedroom, as if it had snowed;
And an obdurate stranger come to visit my body.

This is how it all renews itself, floating down
Mothy on the shallow end of sleep;
How Easter gets here, and the hard-bitten dogwood
Flowers, and waters run clean again.

I am a new old man.
As morning sweetens the forsythia and the cats
Bristle with impudent hungers, I learn to smile.
I am a new baby.

What woman could turn from me now?
Shining like a butter knife, and the fever burned off,
My whole skin alert as radar, I can think
Of nothing at all but love and fresh coffee.
-------------------------

As soon as I knew I wanted to use this poem, I knew I needed a Frida Kahlo painting to team up with it. The Ace of Spades sold me, a tarot symbol, a supernatural force symbolized by a skull. I can't think of skulls without thinking of the Day of the Dead. Then I remembered Frida Kahlo's painting "Tree of Hope" and I knew this was it. The fertile, proud, healthy version of herself, perched in a nightscape next to the daytime bed of invalid Frida. No more back brace. There's a duality here, broken and virile, color and absence of color, day and night, sickness and health, and a strong theme of renewal that I see in both Chappell's and Kahlo's work. So here's what I came up with:


Desiring Frida by Marissa DeSantis:

This morning the brace is gone,
for in the night the stubborn bolts
vacated and left the blood and blister, sweat to dry,
the skin to renew.
A woman in a red dress was here,
or perhaps a fever dream
or perhaps the Ace of Spades
reversed,
a tarot skull with
chiclet teeth white as dogwood,
chattering through the forest para Dia De Los Muertos.
But I am alive
in this bed with my flag and my forsythia.
And I wave for the woman to come,
Come, I am virile, I am not asleep
I am waiting for coffee,
for this clean snow to fall and kiss
your dark eyebrow
while I touch you again
for the first time.