On First Seeing a Portrait of a Self-Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

[…] not quite death but something

beforehand, undulant & grave,          dolor for dolor.

A private notebook. Freak descant.

Of the original ‘I” she intended

to perform as portrait-subject, how much remains fair

             copy in the de Vargas of what                                             [NICOLÁS ENRÍQUEZ DE VARGAS SD]

she herself made & painted with her own hand?

By all means, begin without false hindsight.

Whom do we wish to recover?

  The living.       Living in this light,

history unbecomes itself, a Baroque love-register,

bending credulities, turning its traceries inward,

            excluding, exclusive to its own generation.

If she sd she sd to the nth – do we live with more

            certain carnal knowledge? I could’ve

loved her unforgiven. I admit this, after her fashion.

Quit of men’s rhetoric, the fuck-fête,  

its sturm-un-drang of lethal grazes, she took love

as self-inflicted theme: y de tu mano pinto.

What I have come to admire are, after all, her

            choices – her force of habit, her

heartbeat in the escudo de monja: her nun’s badge

embroidered with Annunciation,

                                            anti-ekphrastic voice.  

As salutation: levitation,

            into the foreground, of a Divine Office.

Dove-white, bareknuckle as day:

her index finger parting its labial fore-edge.

¿Quien en amor ha sido mas dichoso?

Who has been luckier             stupid-in-love?                                            YO, LE PEOR DE TODAS

Matthew Carey Salyer is the author of two collections, including the forthcoming Probation. His work appears in Narrative, Hunger Mountain, Southword, Thrush, Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Columbia Review, and other journals. He works as an associate professor at West Point and a bouncer in the Bronx.