Poetry: 'Dark Places' - Left (After Gericault’s Left Hand on Deathbed (1824) ) by Victoria Nordlund

By Victoria ​Nordlund

Artist's Statement

I am drawn to the bizarre, the ugly, the surreal. My poems deconstruct and construct realities, blend the past and present, and try to make sense of a world that often defies logic. These works dissect relationships, love, and loss. I enjoy peeling the skin off my subjects and discovering humor and beauty in very dark places. 

Left 
Théodore Géricault developed a relationship 
with the morgue near his studio just north 
of Paris. He checked out limbs like library books.
Kept arms and legs and heads and torsos
at his house for weeks, watched them decay,
painted masterpieces with the remains.

Eight hours before his death at thirty-two,
he painted his own left hand in watercolors.
Stretched his arm out on his bed for the other
to outline. Captured his flesh still blushing, 
his veins still delivering, his fingertips still holding
the unfinished canvas. 
 
Hey____,  
I am here 
                   in the palm of this ekphrasis.
And since you made a ghost of me, 
                   since you never cared
 to see my last hand,                           
               I will borrow yours, 
study it’s decomposition,
              trace it over and over, 
make it wave 

goodbye.