Nacer de Nuevo/Rebirth by Remedios Varo

by Christien Gholson

​She pushes through matted roots, emerges into an earthen room, 
sees the root-sprouted table that holds a water-filled grail. She  

emerges, lit from within, from the sun inside the earth. Call her 
Luminar. In the middle of a busy bookstore, I recognized that  

image though I’d never seen it before. How did she know what 
had been inside me since birth? A hole in the root-ceiling revealed  

a crescent moon, reflected off the water’s surface. She stares into 
the reflection, entranced, pleased, at the threshold of the room she  

has been searching for her entire life, but hadn’t known existed 
until that moment. Call her Liminar. And I stood there, looking  

down at that painting, Luminar as Liminar, entranced, perpetually
breaking through, into the secret, rooted to a room moving in and  

out of time. I was the chalice bearing the moon’s illusive tracks; 
the woman hatched into the root-room, discoverer and discovered  

at the same time; the slim arched door beyond the table holding 
the grail, opening out to distant bare trees, night trees, keeping  

silent vigil. So many selves suddenly available. Now, every time 
I look at this painting, she says to me: We are not just one thing,  

never just one thing. I take in a deep breath, my first breath…

Christien Gholson's "Jésus-Christ nous offrant son sang" and "Inside Leonora Carrington's Painting the Giantess While Standing at the Edge of a Pond" also appear in Volume IV of Ekphrasis Magazine.