Michele Santamaria

Oberwolfach, a Love Poem

Green, the color of science. Of Germany.
Frida Kahlo wrote this in a diary entry
where she discussed what colors mean.
In the mathematicians’ colony of Oberwolfach,
you are a monk in the forest, working towards
something you can’t see: figures and symbols
recalcitrant. Willful. What you want
is to create something new. Or, if not new,
what you might call an interesting result.
Frida’s art was an interesting result: impaled
by a beam as a young woman, then willingly
subjected to love’s mutilations. Together,
husband, we saw “The Two Fridas": one heart
in cross-section, vein leading to a clamp:
two pools of blood so small they resemble
the rosettes at the hem of her white dress,
except one spills into the other. A waterfall.
And the other Frida, holding her hand, wears
Indian clothes. There is another portrait of Frida
as a buck, arrows piercing her sides. A forest,
like the one where thought transports you
farther away than anyone could track.
The sea behind Frida's likeness looks more
like sky than water. Behind and around you,
husband—I want to be the negative space
that a careful hand would trace to make you
visible. I’d like my body to be invisible,
that free of me, that empty.

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Michele Santamaria’s poems have been published in Honey Literary, Sugar House Review, Bayou Magazine, The Canary and Bellingham Review, among others. She is an assistant professor and Learning Design Librarian at Millersville University in Millersville, Pennsylvania.