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Alicia Ostriker
Kenneth Ryan
Gary Corseri
Timothy Liu
Claudia Grinnell
Craig Chisholm
Diane Wakoski
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The Seventh Seal: A Meditation on Black and White
And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was
silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.
Chap 7, Verse 1, Revelations
Here is a slice of dandelion-hued
pineapple flesh.
I've cut it for you and invited you to
sit down. Pineapple,
like jacinth cushions and the sun
as a chair, perhaps a throne?
Now we watch the movie.
It's black and white, full of dangerous Revelations,
horsemen riding past a chess board
It stars a girl, who is not suited to black and white encounters
—no cheekbones like Lauren Bacall
or aristocratic nose/ Barbara Stanwyck—if she
were just cuter, we'd have
Debbie Reynolds.
Even perfect with jonquil ribbons though,
she'd not be the girl that the Knight from Bergman's Seventh Seal
would make part of his quest,
her mind filled with Plato,
translating each pawn or rook into what their
invisible forms
might be.
She knows this man,
who is more golden
than a basilica dome
and nothing like fragrant ripe tropical fruit,
is outside her ken.
This man looks nothing like
Max von Sydow*, yet reminds her of him somehow.
This man is the Knight of Architectures
she met in college,
and she is playing chess now
with this Golden Knight, hoping that to win
will be to win his—dare we say? love?
Somehow I never understood, never got it:
Winning wouldn't have done any good.
He had another girl.
I am trying to comprehend how I loved so many men,
this one included,
who could never have had, as they say,
eyes for me.
The movies are always my mantra. So,
if we could understand the way a man who looked like a radiant Charles Dance
gets translated into the young and umber, medieval
Max von Sydow
—in the mind of the girl not suited for black and white—
wouldn't we learn about how she has lived her life?
Wouldn't we know
why nothing she ever has is
enough? Wouldn't
we know how it would look
if she devoured the pineapple and sat
in the Aloha sun, leaving the throne empty, thus creating
the idea of a moon?
You see what I mean? The sun gone,
the empty chair might become the reflected
moon?
I know, you don't see why I am invoking
The Seventh Seal,
a game of chess played not for mankind,
but just one couple.
Knight against hooded figure—
the stakes: the Knight and his wife to escape the plague.
But I am trying to show you how you start with the sun,
who is the mortal Knight,
and cannot save its reflection,
the moon. What a game! Does this mean you have lost the sun
and become the moon? Yes, if you mean the new moon,
the moon, invisible, limned
against the black Knight. Yes, that a game of chess
is not possible if you don't play against
yourself. Does this
come as a shock?
Probably not.
*the actor who plays the medieval Knight who must beat Death at a game of chess, in The Seventh Seal, in order to save his wife and himself from the plague.
Diane Wakoski, who was born in Southern California and educated at UC, Berkeley, lived and began her poetry career in New York City from 1960-1973. Since 1975, she has been Poet In Residence at Michigan State University where she continues to teach as a University Distinguished Professor. Her poetry has been published in more than twenty collections and many slim volumes; Emerald Ice won the William Carlos Williams prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989. The Butcher's Apron is her most recent book, and currently she is working on a big project, poetry as autobiography, called Noir.
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