Ekphrastic, Jay Parr

Constance

[Regarding the Sculpture of Constance Lloyd Wilde Holland at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Statue in Central Dublin]

Naked and pregnant, kneeling small, exposed in your shame before all of Dublin, your face the frown of trust betrayed as you look back at your larger-than-life Oscar, who ignores your wounded gaze to leer at the lithe torso of the ancient Greeks’ licentious Dionysus (later rendered Sir Rubens’ voluptuous Bacchus) a man to whom you have turned your back, but the world has cast you and him of the same weathered bronze, while your sometime Oscar, rendered resplendent in colorful stones collected from four continents, his hands bedecked with your wedding ring flanked by scarabs of good and ill fortune, the tie of his beloved Trinity glazed at his throat, lounges on a boulder stolen and lugged from the Wicklow Mountains—Oscar, in death as in life, ever the fulcrum of the V, the focus of endless scandal, of scorn tempered with admiration, infamy with fame, as you are pushed to one side, to change your name yet again, from Wilde to Holland as once from Lloyd to Wilde, in the vain hope of pulling your sons from the shadow of your still-husband their father’s endless scandals, exiled by outrageous fortune to the continent, to die forgotten in the periphery, of a botched surgery for a condition yet to be understood, and to be immortalized here, naked and cold on a pedestal of his words—his words, not yours, in the park of his childhood, not yours, even your nude form borrowed from a friend of the artist—your humiliation and your shame laid bare for all to see.