Richie Hofmann: Scene from Caravaggio
Meanwhile, the artist’s hand
spreads black against black,
the rest of him off-screen, grinding
colors—divine-wine for the lips, underside-
of-watercress for the skin—glancing back toward me,
as if I am in the picture.
Watching him, alone
in lived time, I feel anachronistic, like the fedora
he wears, the cigarette he holds
against his lips with two fingers.
The screen I watch is a canvas strewn
with nudity, with the taken-
down, everything happening all
too late. The artist paints an angel, posed
on a box with a quiver,
though in the glow of the film, I can see
he is only a model with props in a studio.
Artificial light
burns in the stillness.
Chiaroscuro. The other half
veiled and equivocal, like the room
in which I myself am staged.
In which the screen illuminates
my mouth and forehead and eyes.
In which the difference between an angel
and a boy with wings is real.
RICHIE HOFMANN is the recipient of a 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. His poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He has received, most recently, the John Ciardi Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Peter Taylor Fellowship in Poetry from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.
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