title from the biography by Arianna Stassinopoulos Her biographer gives us the woman, the artist: two sides of a coin presenting contrary faces. She calls the woman Maria, the artist @3La Callas,@1 a Greek bearing gifts to Milan, darling and scourge of La Scala and not to be trusted. When hecklers tossed radishes onto the stage @3La Callas@1 smiled, ecstatic, gathered them to her breast like the loveliest roses. In her fifties Maria asked, @3Why doesn't anyone write an opera for Mary Magdalene?@1 That vision of washing a god's feet with her tears: what convincing drama! I could have been useful there: I carried my mother's genes for histrionics, tear-ducts the most active prop in my repertoire. Cried — not just from remorse, depression, and worse. I cried from relief, anger, sudden noise, the exact turn of a phrase, the terrors and joys of total understanding. And drying the Savior's feet with my hair: the image obsessed me, though my skimpy locks had been chopped off at three in hopes that short hair would thicken. All over town, my sister's luxuriant curls spilled from studio windows on both sides of the block. Maria, the man I've found, man I will never marry, calls me @3La Maddalena.@1 My hair on the cutting- room floor nearly white, it was late luck invited him in. The art each of us lives by, a country between us, keeps us apart. Two faces of one coin at the going rate, obverse joining reverse, close to the other side. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...PHILOMELA by JOHN CROWE RANSOM VALENTINES TO MY MOTHER: 1880 by CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI THE ROSE OF PEACE by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS AGAMEMNON: WELCOME TO AGAMEMNON by AESCHYLUS LOVER'S LAMENT by EVA K. ANGLESBURG |