Love Sleeping, Lies

-after a painting by Caravaggio

Traveling alone, I enter the umpteenth gallery within which a magnet—as if hearing one’s name called in a thrill across a room of strangers— pulls me to Amore Dormiente. All else falls away like how love at first sight is more a recognition than awakening. No questions, no doubt. The Cupid dreams in ecstasy of the arrow piercing.

Later, sketching from the Museum post card my charcoal line reveals distortions. The little god is twisted, gut hanging, chest sunken, neck propped awkwardly in a black bed of emptiness. Golden flesh in chiaroscuro becomes jaundice or worse, the iridescence of putrefaction. Was the cupid dead? The model, a diseased child whose beatific sleep was in reality, the death mask of relief.

Craft, not love, incarnates. It is the artist shoots the arrow while gazing at suffering. Most of all we want this: to be shot, dazed, to abandon scrutiny. To be bullseye.

Liane Collins