How to Paint the Savior Dead

Jason Gray

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9780873389082
• eBook ISBN:
  9781612777849
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Jason Gray's How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks the complex traditional connections among women's bodies, spirituality, and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors. Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more—much more—than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, 'what is heavenly for what is Heaven.'" — Andrew Hudgins

"Jason Gray ends his sequence 'Meditations of the Tomb Painters' with the lines: 'Here is my heart in paint, a stowaway / Inside the art that only God would see.' And indeed, in all of Gray's work there is a sense that the heart, the faithful and abiding heart, is best (and most safely) transported via the artifice of poetry. From the heart-wrenching, blank-verse ekphrastic 'My Daughter as the Angel Gabriel . . .' to the heartily clever nonce 'You Put Your Right Hand In. . . ,' this is work that is always worshipful of its medium." — Kathy Fagan

"The ekphrastic poems in How to Paint the Savior Dead celebrate and enact the power of words to exhume a living body—a human's or a god's—from the stilled depths of the painted image. Jason Gray, a chiaroscurist drawn to the drama at the border between light and dark, the seen and the hidden, and the sacred and the profane, writes wisely, wryly, wonderfully, and, at times, wickedly about the 'common beauty' of the quotidian and the 'mundane miracle' of the divine." — Eric Pankey

YOUR ART HISTORY

i. First Lesson

The first thing I ever heard from you

Was how to paint the Savior dead.

I felt unseated, struck like Mary

At the angel’s visitation,

And fell in love with your voice. Here

Was prophecy: I sensed the words

Shook you as much as they shook me.

But the foretold means nothing if none

Can read what’s on the summer air

And what is not: against the dark

A flash of fireflies, a speck

Of water on the brightest day.

ii. Interpretation

Here you are the Corinthian Maid,

Trying to get your lover into the sun

To trace his shadow. Always he must go,

Always you stay. How you will learn to love

The rock you drew on when he’s gone.

Born out of need to keep at least a ghost

Of our loves, the history of art is this:

The bitter kiss of chalk left on your lips

When stone is film plate and adored.

Forget the process, love the aftertaste.

When Adam left to tend his olives,

You were left to bear his image.

His knee-high boys with jelly-covered fingers

Grasped your skirt and marked their territory.

The jelly stains were little hearts all over you.

No woman had ever been so loved, you told yourself,

And scratched a stick into the ground.

iii. Case Study (The Annunciation by Jan van Eyck)

Here she stands stained blue

And ready to divide

Into a copy of God,

Who focuses His light

Through the window lens—her name

Projected upside down

As if the painter knew

Years hence all newlyweds

Would be thus joined and sainted.

iv. Inspiration

Right now you are afield

Taking impossible photographs

Of a wedding—someone you

Once loved, and someone else in white.

The invitation plain

And on the level; still, you wonder

If this is a fiction you’re creating.

Look at the image reborn

In the chemical bath, the darkness drawn

Out of the white, and fixed

Forever. Though maybe some time later

You’ll find a small square emptied

Of its memories, the way her dark

Hair loosened from the veil

And spilled over the dress, his tie

Undone and hanging down

His wine-stained shirtfront as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Adam’s Tongue
• Photographing Eden
• A Generic Pietà
• My Daughter as the Angel Gabriel in the Tableau Vivant of Van Grap’s Annunciation
• Stone Goddess
• Hey, You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
• St. Cecilia and an Angel
• Meditations of the Tomb Painters
• The Little Sphinx
• Chiaroscuro
• You Put Your Right Hand In, You Take Your Left Hand Out
• Adam Gifts Eve with a Session of Boudoir Photography
• Chagall in Heaven
• Memento Amori
• Your Art History
• Notes