Ekphrastic Poem by 2000 Blacklock Nature Sanctuary Fellow
Francine Sterle

 

Schiele's Studio, 1909

The soul is a distant land.

--Arthur Schnitzler



A square room. Surrounded by chalk-white walls, black objects:
black tables, crates and chairs, black curtains, black cushions,
the lacquer boxes, black, the ebony glass ash trays, black bound books,
black vases on black shelves, the Japanese stencil cuts, black, in black frames,
even the easel, black, and Schiele standing amid it all in a freshly pressed,
starch-white painter's smock saintly as a monk dressed in his best Sunday habit.
When he lifts a fine-haired brush eye-level to a stretched canvas and begins,
how far away seem his eldest sister's death, father's syphilitic insanity,
his beloved father's agonizing death, his mother's lifelong disapproval,
his narrow-minded uncle's disapproval, his burning, incestuous love
for his stunning young sister, how far away the Academy, the disdain,
the lopsided morals, the sumptuous facades, the unnatural obsession
surrounding decorum, decoration, surface. When Schiele lifts his brush,
the immaculate canvas waits for eros and thanatos to arrive, exchange greetings,
struggle, refuse to get out of each other's way, and with thick, rapid strokes,
his own body appears half-clothed, ghostly, sadistically tattooed to reveal
the edges, the undesirable angularity, the sexual hunger that will not let him go,
this man on the leash of his senses, exposing the voyeurism, self-loathing, the self-
absorption as he spies his own psyche, fixates on the divided self, the tortured,
grotesque soul he's come to know distended vertically against a blank backdrop,
no points of reference except his own disarticulated body, his narcissism so complete
we are left alone outside the peephole complicity of Schiele's long standing mirror,
alone, outside, estranged, as he is.

 

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