Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review

THE DEATH OF SARDANAPALUS

by Steve Gherke

I have seen the death mask of my Gericault! To die among all
one has created, in all the passion and vigor of youth . . . .

-- Eugene Delacroix

Operatic, bold, the sultan laid out in his ghostly robes,
all ruined luxury, opium-faced, reposed,
the whole scene, candlestick and drapery, about to be torched,
the Kingdom spilling its jewels at his feet.
Here is suicide made opulent, harem-girls rubbing oil

into their skin to make their corpses gleam, sword-
blades singing through the horses’ throats,
a slaughterhouse concerto, and Delacroix, frenzied
as a conductor beneath his dark symphony
of hair, trying to paint the motion in, as if one cymbal-

crash of inspiration might ignite the scene, the horse-
blood, ashes, drops of poison in the wine,
the rebels just outside the door, the sultan thinking, let them
conquer nothing, the pearl-dust
of a vanished history, though it’s France he paints,

playing the sheet-music of its past on a foreign instrument,
an elegy for the cities Napoleon plundered in retreat, plucking what he could from the grape-
bunch of each city’s gems, the rest left to shrivel
beneath the bee-storm of a blaze, or the monarchy restored,

like a slow internal bleeding, though to love the self,
Delacroix thinks, is to love our ruined history,
the shadow of his country’s borders collapsing in his veins,
the way, at death, the edges of the body flee,
so that it’s Gericault he calls into the scene, horse-thrown,

capsized, his body being swallowed by the dust storm
of its own retreat, each breath like a nail yanked
from wood, and his paintings, those bent and mournful faces
he made of the insane, arranged about the bed
as pallbearers, Delacroix thought then, the master having sealed

himself into the asylum of each frame. Ragged, obedient,
feeding twigs of Gericault into the furnace
of the sultan’s face, Delacroix feels the master taking
hold of him as he paints, the way in a lesson
he’d latch onto a wrist, the ego heeled when the master

tightened the collar of his grip, as if to paint as someone
else was to paint blameless, unconstrained,
like soldiers touched by the King’s spirit as they fight,
though it’s just another romance, isn’t it,
like Gericault thinking heaven lay scattered in the paint,

or believing the sultan, robe-swaddled, wrapped
in the darkening clouds of his defeat,
condemning and condemned, feels each wound
open in him a corresponding scream,
while his most faithful servants, open-mouthed, insane,

swallow jewels wrapped in cubes of bread, thinking
they’ll smuggle a piece of the master’s soul
with them to their grave. Don’t they know,
by now, that no earthly thing — not mercy,
skin or oil — will stop the invasion of the blades?