After Lady St. John as Hebe by Sir Thomas Lawrence
He touched canvas
the way other men touched skin,
with reverence,
with regret.
Sir Thomas,
chronicler of satin wrists,
and unshed sighs
you chased women
the way light chases a swan’s wing:
never fast enough,
never fully.
And yet,
here she floats.
Lady St. John,
no longer woman,
but Hebe,
the bringer of youth to God.
You gave her the chalice,
but not the thirst.
Fingers curled like petals at dusk,
a gesture of offering, not of need.
Youth poured into a woman’s body,
too perfect to breathe.
Throat like porcelain veined with light,
shoulders bare as untouched snow.
She is alabaster and breathlessness,
an opal in silk,
hair coiled like smoke at twilight,
neck like the stem of a white lily.
Eyes glazed in a silence,
he mistook for grace.
Tell me Thomas,
did you believe you could paint Salvation?
You,
undone by sisters,
who never chose you,
by debts that curled like ivy,
around your rising fame.
A man applauded by kings,
but haunted by the ghost of an unkissed life.
Look at her—
a gilded girl of Olympus.
But it is you
Sir Thomas,
lover of what could not love him back
who stains the canvas most.
You could not keep a woman,
so you summoned a goddess.
In this frame, she would not age,
she could not walk away.
But she is not a goddess.
She is the absence of a wound
you invented to hide
how mortal you always were.