Maudlin Mary
Modeled by the skilled and clumsy hands
of artists and artisans into an ideal state of she-ness,
a penniless waif appears on a stool
last week a stranger called her Mona Lisa.
Statuesque upon the betrayer
warmed by the lemon-lolly light from
bays of north facing windows, blinded;
she can but blink.
Surrounded by a
cog-notched cyclical wheel of nubile artists—
blooming buds of wildness, vertical sprigs
flail softly on the breezy bounty of
illumination.
Brush and trowel, thick and thin,
the artists stoke her—semblance
canvased by millennium brush biters
maudlin Mary is returned to the pre-historic stew
by the likes of Claude
polished to a pearly perfection
by type A, Hieronymus’.
They were all strangers to her posers,
every bit as much as she.
Royal pretenders in a world
where only the artless
are paid.
Moneylenders rise on their discarded carapaces
beauty sucked dry by the doers and shakers
who spread like choking bittersweet through
the lollypop-light from the bay windows facing north
consuming Mona.
Julie ford Oliver - Famous Models
Ekphrasis
First Appeared in Illumen Magazine Fall of 2014
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