A POEM FOR THE PANDEMIC

Before this pandemic, I’d pose for artists a few evenings every week and stand still for hours while I was drawn, painted, or sculpted. You would think with that kind of patience I’d be able to handle sitting in my house for long periods of time, but you’d be mistaken.
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There was a time when I was the artist, drawing figures from behind the easel. And I consumed art in museums through the lens of an artist. "Oh look how skilled the brushstroke technique is there, or look how lifelike the sculptor carved that body in marble!"
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But then I became the model, and the way I viewed art shifted. I began to look at the figures and wonder, "who was the real person, or model, or multiple models behind this final image?"
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Most of the time these models are undocumented, their names lost to the ages.
We are only left with their images, bent into the composition of the artist.
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And so I transpose my own experience onto their bodies. What secrets do their bodies hold?
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Did their nerves also quake after hours of holding still? Did loneliness make their torsos tighten and heavy? Did they feel anxiety in their lower backs or rumblings of fear in their stomachs? Did they also feel joy as lightless in their joints? What wars and plagues did they survive and what scars did it leave them with?
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We like to say all this is unprecedented. But not too far away in some war zone or not too far back in history, people have experienced these feelings before.
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And someday, there will be people looking at the images of us, wondering how we did it.