Ekphrasis Borghese

Daisy Bassen

This is a real place.

The tour guide said the Northern painters

Were better at detail, the Italians

Better at bodies. The bees, she said,

Were more real than real, than real bees

Would be, would have been;

The Northern painter had studied the bees

Beneath a lens, more acute than a naked eye.

Cranach’s Venus isn’t naked,

She wears a necklace and a hat with a plume,

Her misshapen hips girdled with silk so fine

It is just visible, though he didn’t study

The weave through a lens. The tour guide

Is wrong, the bees are not more real,

There is no hyper reality to make you justified

In fearing to be stung, the gardens outside

Only half-filled with bees, the layers

That define reality more delicate

Than the suggestive girdle, the downcast gaze

Of the Italian Venus opposite, hardly worth

Discussing. She was wrong 

But she was a good teacher, her hands held

As scales between the paintings. We won’t find

Ourselves here again, not as we are,

Naked, at the mercy of light and the glass

That bends it, that can set us on fire.

I’m sure as she was sure. And I, for one, am real.