Simulacrum by Richard Weaver

          After Modigilani

With one hand he suspends everything
in the framed space of an open window.

He lifts the canvas weight as easily
as her almond-shaped eyes rise to take

pleasure in the wind wrapping itself around
the spine of a tree. Her faith’s a gravity slowly

lowering to earth. There’s a spreading light
beyond this violence. A column supporting

the athlete of the eye, and in the painted figure
of a nude on the beige wall, a one-handed effigy.

The strength of its secret lies in the collusion
of objects, not in the straightforward abstraction.

The red square, the blue circle and yellow triangle
whetting the edge of a voice. Pressed against the wall

rising in short, broken waves, a human head expands
in an arabesque of its own faith which begins in pleasure

and now fades in the autumnal cry of an opaque sun
in the space between the perfect shadow and a fixed sessile light.



Richard Weaver is the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub in Baltimore. Other publications include conjunctions, Louisville Review, Southern Quarterly, Birmingham Arts Journal, Coachella Review, FRIGG, Hollins Critic, Xavier Review, Atlanta Review, Dead Mule, Vanderbilt Poetry Review, and New Orleans Review. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and wrote the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005). He was one of the founders of the Black Warrior Review and its Poetry Editor for the first four years. Recently, his 204th prose poem was accepted since he began writing them in 2016. (Only 353 remain available as of today).