Woman in the Painting

Her face has disappeared. This happens
more often than you think. She sits
at a table with her hands in her lap
beside her husband, his arms
folded over one another, blue bowls
and empty glasses set out before them
and a pitcher of translucent milk.

If the woman had eyes, they would be
the hazel eyes of my mother,
her sadness exposed. If a mouth,
my mother's, her upper lip
with the scar she hid with lipstick.
Like my mother, she would be better
at listening than speaking. Afternoons
after high school my friends would come
when their boyfriends tired of them.
They would sit at a table like this one,
white and gleaming with food,
and she would listen until it was time
for my father to return, her dark hair
pulled behind her ears, her silence
laconic and wise.

Perhaps the woman in the painting
tried to speak, as my mother did,
to her father, raising her face toward him
like the mutt she once begged for,
already cowering but finally unable
to utter a sound, language transformed
to movement, to the trembling body
suppliant before him, her pupils
suddenly large and black, tears
not yet formed but forming.

The husband's face is opulent, his eyes
the color of olives at the bottom of a drink.
Perhaps the woman believes the man
she married is only her husband. For a while
that's what we all think.

Andrea Hollander Budy
Woman in the Painting
Autumn House Press

Copyright © 2006 by Andrea Hollander Budy.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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