The Nereids
by Sheila Black
If you stand in the gallery on the first floor
and keep still, the stone appears to breathe a little.
The Nereids are braced against the wind and spray.
They stand close, close to the waves,
headless now, arms broken at elbows or wrists,
but still their haunches—marble muscle
caught in a kind of turbulent tension. They resist.
The air around them assumes a weird
freshness, though they were cut in pieces,
wrapped, placed in wooden crates, unloaded
from ships docking in Southampton, Port of London,
Liverpool. Jostled by ox cart to this museum,
where since 1849 they have been arrayed.
Keats came here to see them after he learned
he was dying, the lines he wrote
appearing to open a narrow aperture inside
through which he could breathe a beat beyond
the radical constriction of his ulcerated lungs.
The stone is rough, their robes in places cracked
open; yet some flowing softness lingers from
the maker’s chisel; also, a strength.
The Nereids appear to wish to stare down the sea.
Most who come here don’t notice them—headless,
eyeless, facing the more famous Parthenon friezes.
Keats writes: “So do these wonders a most dizzy
pain, / That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude—”
He coughed a ruby blood into a cotton
handkerchief, paused in the vestibule to shake
out a damp umbrella. Franny Brawne would survive him,
and a fearful rage intermingled with his love.
Yet here the Nereids—their missing arms that
must once have been joined, calves, thighs
clenching to meet a storm we cannot see.
They will not turn or run.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections most recently Radium Dream (Salmon Poetry, Ireland). Poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation. The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011). She lives in San Antonio, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona, where she works as assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU. @SheilaFionaB on Twitter. @sheilafionablack on Instagram.