The Double Woman Poem by Daniel Brick

Moment by moment a life-size
image is being made in a room
adjacent to the Tuesday soiree,
a room others do not enter, a room
others do not notice. Mysteriously,
daubs of paint cover the canvas;
colors adjust themselves; lines
and shadings multiply. An impasto
has built up over the hours and
the weeks a lone man watches a woman
appear twice in adjacent rooms,
a double woman, each native to her
place, one of flesh and one of paint.
I alone know the double woman is one,
but I am pledged to silence, and I witness
a double reign of beauty reduce my friend
to grief. He is so fearful he will be
discovered, and humiliation will fill
the place of desire. I ask him, "What
can be worse than a double woman who
cannot be touched as flesh or spirit?
Choose one and live a life amplified
by pleasure or hope." He ignores me.
I tell him only poets are drawn to
such a room, only those who live
lives guided by poetry would be able
to enter it. These secrets are sacred.
A sincerely harbored secret, he tells
me secretly, can bring an ancient deity
to earth and sky. And now I understand
his heart. He will love the double woman
in the tragic orphean way in which
he will be a perfect victim, forever a singer
singing of perfect love. Happiness and pleasure
count for nothing. Only perfection matters.
And that is the riddle posed by the double woman.
I am close to solving it. Just a few more songs,
just a period of suffering further, and it will
be solved. Unless Aphrodite chooses to manifest
herself from the foam of the sea or the blaze
of an exploding star, and solve this riddle
with the graceful ease of an Immortal who nurtures
in her single nature both compassion and love.