GOOSE DOWN IN THE EUROPEAN WING
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The Dutch painter
Kiel’s The Lacemaker may belong to a series of the five senses and represent sight. The goose down floats across the assassination of John the Baptist and the girl in the lusterless gown and blue apron. Double strands of cotton feed into the shuttle of needles in her hand. Perhaps taken with the balls of thread, her cat observes from behind a chair. Though the lace doesn’t grow, the down ascends past the coral beads at her neck and into the parted clouds of a Tiepolo ― who wrote in 1731 of his sketches as auditions for commissions that they are the finished paintings and the altarpieces are copies ― portraying the annunciation. Winged angels frame the portal of brilliant sky. The goose needed to be captured too, only once, and then became like the cat that doesn’t move on this canvas, it became the feather that does not touch the ground. |
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Lauren Jacqueline Roberts is a poet raised in Massachusetts and living in Brooklyn. Her work appears in The Volta, Barrow Street, the minnesota review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from New York University.