Before the Triptych

The artist’s ancestors pose in the forest of shadows 
like medieval saints. But they are turn of the century 
town folk in harsh light and graffiti colors. 

Blue fronds dangle from trees that intercede 
between the ancestors and the sky. 
Like God and the Tsar, the stars are so small, 

so distant, hidden by darkness, hidden by 
fronds. It could be daylight above, not night. 
Here humid air and brushstrokes smear 

the portrait intended for posterity, for children 
of aides working double shifts, for grandchildren 
of couples who died apart yet together. Feel 

how these costumes constrain, not just 
the woman’s steel corset or floor-length skirt, 
but the men’s highwaisted pants, pith hats, 

shirts white as fungi on a night without stars. 

After the Triptych

It wasn’t all horrible, the Filipino nurse tells me 
as she shivers over seltzer at the gallery. 
Don’t imagine it so; don’t depict it. 

She tells me about her family who still live 
in high rises and homes over there, about her sons 
whom they raised while she worked three jobs 

in Chicago. It wasn’t all horrible, she says. 
We had faith. We respected our priests. 
We were educated in those classrooms 

with chalk-white walls, blackboards 
that she loved to wash, and wooden floors 
that she loved to sweep, where she never saw ghosts. 

After recounting her trip to Thelma’s Retreat 
where she picked fruit she misses in the States, 
she turns to me and says, write 

about your own people, their portraits, 
their places, not my people, my places, 
my sparkling blue ocean, my green plants. 

I think of my own ancestors’ photographs. 
Some posed at portrait studios, one flight up 
from the horse-drawn, New England streets. 

Some stood outdoors in front of haystacks in Wilno. 
My ancestors are warmly wrapped against the north wind, 
the weak sun’s glint, the factories’ slick smudge. 

Even if we had to give up our mother tongues, 
our black bread, our jigs and reels, 
our Mass in the fields with our flocks, 

my ancestors were made for this weather, 
the wind that rattles through this empty courtyard, 
pushes its weight against Plexiglas until it bends. 

*Publisher’s Note:

Through the Fronds There Were No Stars (2021), an oil-on-canvas painting (67" tall x 162" wide) by Maia Cruz Palileo, may be viewed in detail at Monique Meloche Gallery:
https://www.moniquemeloche.com/artists/39-maia-cruz-palileo/works/16567-maia-cruz-palileo-through-the-fronds-there-were-no-stars-2021/

Maia Cruz Palileo, whose family immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines, is a Brooklyn-based artist who paints, draws, and sculpts. Additional information and artworks are available at:
https://www.maiacruzpalileo.com/about

Links were retrieved on 27 August 2023.

Marianne Szlyk’s

most recent books are Why We Never Visited the Elms (Poetry Pacific, 2022), Poetry en Plein Air (Pony One Dog Press, 2020), and On the Other Side of the Window (Pski’s Porch, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Verse-Virtual, Poetry Breakfast, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Pure Slush’s anthology Home, among others. She has fond memories of taking art classes at the Worcester (MA) Art Museum with her father, drawing shoes, plastic grapes, and bottles. She lives in the DC area with the wry poet and flash fiction writer Ethan Goffman and their new cat Tyler.