The Tempest
The Tempest No one knows what this painting means. Not even the most respected art critics can say for certain. A naked woman nurses her child in the open air While a man who seems to look past her looks on. Our gaze must pass through his to meet hers, While the child, blind with hunger, feeds. Who is she to him, him to her? Who are either Of them to us, and why did Giorgione feel The need to place them here in a scene As strange as that scene in The Shining Where Wendy Torrance stumbles into a room To find a man dressed as a bear going down On a man in a tux? And why, above it all, Did he construct this storm, the kind of storm That cancels a track meet, not yet overhead But close enough to call it, though that seems to me Less a bolt of lightning than the tail of a sperm cell With its head buried in the fertile clouds, As if we’re witnessing the moment something awful Was guaranteed to be born, while the stork on the roof Seems to undercut everything I’ve said above, Like those stories that end And then she woke up.