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La Géante (The Giantess)
by Ellaraine Lockie

‐After René Magritte's painting, "La Géante," which contains Charles Baudelaire's poem, "La Géante"

She's a lady liberated
from Baudelaire's poetics
From his tomcat worship of women
For what generation of men over the expanse
of time has not knelt at the feet
of a well-formed naked female
Blown her importance out of proportion
with heavy breath of passion

Turned pubescent in her presence
with the predisposition to explore
her staggering proportions
To seduce her with flowery references to soul
steamy eyes and somber flames
And after the flush of fervor has faded
To lie in sated stupor under the cool
shadow of satisfaction

But Magritte's woman
painted a hundred years
after Baudelaire versified her
appears as no oil-engendered giantess
She stands disrobed and secured in scale
to her domestic surroundings
Oblivious to her dwarfed husband
watching from a cat's-eye view
in his business suit

She probably supports
the European suffragette movement
Cleans house without wearing clothes
Reads Virginia Woolf in English
And has enough certitude to do her own seducing
Growing in the husband's grateful eyes
to the queenly size of her namesake


First published: California Ephrastic  

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