Surrealist Muse
by
Anne Whitehouse
Anne Whitehouse is the author of seven poetry collections, including Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, and Outside from the Inside, as well as a novel, Fall Love.
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from Surrealist Muse
In Mexico she found her spiritual country.
Mystery, darkness, witchcraft—the deep worlds
that she’d always sensed were hidden
existed in plain view under the blazing sun,
amid exotic animals and luxuriant foliage.
Her art responded in a shimmer of secrets,
rendered in translucent egg tempera
she produced in her kitchen.
She wasn’t anyone’s plaything anymore.
Bitter experience had taught her
how to protect herself. Once, hoping
to seduce her, the filmmaker Buñuel
locked her in his bathroom.
She decorated the walls with handprints
of her menstrual blood.
She claimed a legacy of ancient knowledge,
passed on through generations of women.
She could bring on illness or exorcise it,
provoke dreams in others as their spiritual guide.
A Zen master said of her at fifty,
“She doesn't know any koans,
but she has resolved them all.”