First Place Winner, September 2001 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, September 2001

THE NUDE
Eric Williams
(Poets.org)

Each course attempts to prepare us for the nude,
that summation of shape and shadow, that end various
and typical, reclining on a threadbare chaise.

We sketched inverted vessels, recorded the face
of the passenger opposite and commended it to practice,
focused long on the rose’s locus, its fleshy unfurling of

gradation and purpose. More, we imagined paradox
to heighten vision: the point without plane, an airborne orb
rotating both ways, a line that begins in the palm and extends

forever. Steadiest of laymen, schooled in perspective
and media option, we assume our smocks and ring the dais.
Some vantages are better than others, the subject’s tones

prove more vivid when glimpsed from this angle,
or this. Then he enters the center, lets fall
a robe piped in crimson and eggshell, lays down

as one’s lover might after a hard day’s work.
There are the familiar flushes, the long-drawn
cones and closed arenas, our stranger subject with finger

stilled, mid-strum, on his stomach. Striations,
downy arcs, sheens more subtle than marble or petal,
surfaces woven of light and agate, ores elastic,

oil and water. We reduce him in the first instant
of our reckoning, assign the simplest archetypes
to his frame. Suggestive waves and ribs to be filled

spread over the canvas. Beyond the rudimentary cues,
the tilts and pivots most coarsely conveyed, are details,
the amateur’s test. Whatever is asked of the body

is answered, layer by layer; each asserts, in succession,
you are closer to my name. No other theme upheld
for scrutiny so compels us to touch it, no other image

on late afternoons reverberates with the secrets:
no love is objective, to realize is love.
We might make it an abstract, we are tempted

to press the innocence from us because we are falling
headfirst into him. His nudity strips us of distance and
limit, it serves as the glass for attentive students of spirit

and body, the boggling intertwine. Beneath that sensitive
fabric fitted to him, beneath the visible film
is another, another still, infinite material intimacy tied

to the pulse and desire to gaze past the barrier, to where
we are pattern, radical enumeration, color and music,
history flowering in vaporized crystal and silk.

Anonymity unique, always outward flowering and echoing
back, interior flux to expression and quicksilver utterance,
return, like a gift. And what of the scholar driven to tip

his eye into empty air, as does the model? There
the palpable mystery, electric, swimming envelopment
and network upheld. We are joined inextricably, each

of us. To see is to reveal. To render, respond in kind.

Judge Joan Houlihan's comment: “Exhibits a high level of craft combined with ambitious subject matter. Masterful use of line break, consistent and credible voice, sophistication of thought and well-developed sense of pacing and syntax all pull the reader effortlessly from line to line, stanza to stanza. Cogent, honed, at times exquisite, imagery. This is an accomplished and intelligent piece of writing, all the more admirable for its compelling transformation of an artist's view into that of the poet, something tackled often but rarely successful.”