The Oval Portrait

to Margarete

“Your hair holds a whole dream.”
- Charles Baudelaire

The image must begin with an aversion:
the trophy hair, detached
from the head of the woman
he once loved, covers the canvas--

preserved, now, against the wall
of the museum, where we will
never find the face, only the obscure
half of the lover's head, as Eurydice.

It is this that the artist has suffered
to reproduce using Margarete’s hair--
manipulating the soft spot of our objectivity,
where form and body are set asunder,

to assure us that the nightmare
which we view is human.