Boy With Basket of Fruit

Abstract

Boy With Basket of Fruit Aidan Forster —after Caravaggio Remember the day the artist took you into the field: the small fist of your body hard and bright, the white lake of the tunic he bade you enter naked and restless. Remember how you undressed the trees, clutched peaches in your hand like small orange hearts. How your body was wild with leg and grape, so easy to split and eat. Remember the grass you tore from the earth, the roots you knotted like rings over your fingers, what was and was not painted. He loved you this way: finger on the blossom of your lip. Finger in the hook of your open mouth. Your body was a prop he made out of berries and blood: something to plant until it greened, something exotic he named good boy and yes, do this with your face. Remember, like a good mouth, the field took what it was fed. [End Page 152] Copyright © 2017 Pleiades and Pleiades Press