Umbilical

Lucian Freud, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995)

Because it is all pigment on stretched canvas,

her face’s dreaming inwardness,

the sunken navel like punched dough,

and muddy browns where the potpourri/camo-

upholstered couch cast shadow on the floor

are of a piece, furnishing the eyes

with evidence of depth that’s readily debunked.

From under her bosom’s abundance four

fingers emerge, the right arm buried.

The left, like a spawn-spent eel, escapes

Sargasso doldrums or, saurian, peers

into the adjacent watershed.

It reaches back to when I was a boy,

helping my mother make bread post-divorce.

We took turns kneading. What is kneading? You pull

the back of something formless up over

the rest and push to make a kind of fold.

But fat, not flat. Voluptuously awkward.

Like recollecting one’s mom while viewing nudes

at a Freud retrospective. So be it. I smell

yeast in the air, feel the readied oven’s warmth,

and drawing away a damp tea towel

that bellied over the broad bowl’s rim,

aim my floured fist at what has risen.

Fig. 1

Lucian Freud (1922–2011), Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) (oil on canvas) / Private Collection / © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images