Day 6 Hieronymous Bosch Ekphrastic

Eve by the Wrist


In Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
God takes Eve by the wrist, helps her
up from the ground of her birth—
Adam, after his exhausting costectomy, still seated
there. God is leading her to the first husband as if
she were a child who had somehow strayed. And
while I’m trying to remember the iconography
of the wrist hold (something about lust?)
Pallid Eve—all the people in Garden except the Moors
are pallid; the Moors are black—keeps her
eyes on the ground, demure, sure, but not happy
with this arrangement. In fact most of the women
in the painting look bored or anxious or
like they want to be elsewhere. The men
have been had by the great sinning bitch of a world.

A Flemish painting, and profoundly weird,
 Earthly Delights hangs in a famous
Spanish museum. The painting, quite big,
a triptych after all, draws a crowd every day,
a textbook favorite, and Picasso’s Guernica, and
the wonderful Goyas and Grecos and
Velásquezes. Last night I dreamt myself wandering
Museo del Prado’s corridors, all of which had been
emptied by plague. El Retiro también.

And so you see. The poem is not
the assigned ekphrastic, but a mark
in time, like any painting. Like
anyone’s death. So many, undone.