ON BEING ST. CATHERINE (1857)

by Anna Leahy

          "I constitute myself in the process of 'posing,' I instantaneously make another body
          for myself, I transform myself into an image."  

                    —Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes

 

I imagined myself on the way
to have my body stretched over the wheel,
not later,
when the angels came
with lightning that sent spikes and splinters
into the air. Blood everywhere.
I wouldn’t have looked any happier then,
so it was a good thing
he painted the scene he painted:
my sulking self looking more pallid
than I knew, though if boredom
and the heft of such luxurious fabrics
could kill,
this painting might have done me in.
When I am beheaded, I thought,
milk will flow from my veins.
It was a relief not to be myself,
to see someone else’s future.

 

          Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) was an artist’s model, a painter, and a poet
          associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and married to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

 

 

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