Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View
by Raj Arumugam
1
she’s the delicate head of a young woman
in Agnolo Bronzino’s drawing;
she says, ‘Look. You can look;
look, I don’t really mind;
and if you feel shy,
I’ll have my eyes and face
down all the while’
and in her charm she says:
‘We’ll leave repressed debaters
about lust and propriety far behind;
I want you to look and you want to;
that’s all that matters between us’
a man can look all the while
as she has eyes down forever;
a beauty unreachable
just a piece of paper maybe
and mostly bits of dots and pixels
in cyberspace
2
could we have lived
darling,
in the same space and time
I might have followed
where you beckoned;
I might have beaten
Agnolo Bronzino
with a Michelangelo skill;
but now perhaps I’ll
copy and paste
and post
my image beside yours somewhere in cyberspace
and perhaps when I’m not watching
my image will walk over to yours
and you might look up at my avatar
and you’d say:
‘Sweetheart, what took you so long?’
And the two of you might just run away
like cheeky teenagers
and run through various sites and
run across everyone’s screen;
and as the two of you get along
and chat about times and love
and the arts of love and such matters
I might be asleep or be at a meeting
and I’ll have a strange feeling
a cool sensation all over my body
and I’d say to whoever is beside me:
‘You know, something’s happened in cyberspace…
a strange love thing between an image of me
and the delicate head of a young woman…’
