Amit Majmudar Master/Forger
1.
Of course the forger's masterpiece would be
A Supper at Emmaus, where the bread
Breaks open in the stranger's hands, birth-warm,
Lighting him like a sunrise happening
Miles below God's chin. It's by that likeness
He is known for what he was, these hands
The hands whose loaves had fed them all, this man
The one whose love was bread laid on the tongue,
Himself, original, there in the flesh
That resurrection painted over death.2.
The Dutch master forger of the Dutch master
Bought period canvases to overpaint:
A feast scene, an anonymous Madonna.
To fissure centuries into a surface
And fake the shattered pattern of hand skin
Required an oven and a timer's ting
For the pan to spill, and the bread to split.3.
The forger lays the master's plaster death mask
Over his breathing, blinking face. The forger
Forgets himself the way we say love must.
The forger either suffocates or hardens,
In both cases his face pale plaster when
He sees his hands, possessed and moving now
Like deaf ballerinas to a shared music,
Paint him a Christ and the Adulteress—
She who was false, false to her true and only.4.
As if Vermeer were merely a language, one
In the same family as Dutch and yellow light
Where the word for window is the word for wall
And our wall has no equivalent.
As if Vermeer had a chromatic grammar
That could be mapped, syntax that could be mastered,
Memorization granting anyone
A smattering, immersion making fluent
A man stuck stammering his mother tongue.
Or was Van Meegeren vernacular
Vermeer, Vermeer corrupted into new life
Like cold church Latin into hellfire Tuscan?
The body in the grave, bread in the bread pan
Rising: true forgery a resurrection.5.
One thing about those period canvases.
You rarely knew who painted them. Nobodies,
Dated contemporaries of the timeless.
Van Meegeren wheezed, in his last weeks,
Of his great dread the greatest hoaxer God
Had put one over on him, or rather under—
Under those fourteen Vermeers he had forged
One true Vermeer he never recognized.