Ana's Story (Poem)

Ana Mendieta, Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973-77

Color Photograph, 19-3/8" x 26-9/16"

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Ana's Story

She made me change her light bulbs.
      She was afraid of heights. . . would never go near windows.
           ~ Carolee Schneeman on "Where is Ana Mendieta?"

Her contour
bloodied pavement not
yet rubbed clean,
its cold stains
a gritty premonition
of violence timed

not to birth,
unscripted, not carved
in soft lime
stone visage,
no trinity of ficus
branches looped secure.

~

Smudged crimson,
a Cuban Eve, her
life's primal
shape earth's own,
till her Carl, his anger pitched,
gave her up to sky.

~

Denier
Carl Andre, husband,
spent three years
on his own
dull story:
Ana went out the window
but not by his hands.

Ninety-three
pounds she was; Carl not
twice more: more.
The room mess,
the scratches, and No, no, no
heard but never proved.

~

When she fell
thirty-four stories,
her age just
thirty-six,
how could she know we'd lament
her body's swoop down,

wildflowers
stuck between her legs,
bare arms spread
out and wide,
her pigment branding concrete
without resistance?

~

She laid down
for us her handprints,
burning one
cement gash
into another; each smear
impressed, reduced; less

legible
sign Ana was here.
Let's be frank:
one air jump;
Ana supine, cut close, she
has no surrogate.

~

Ancient marks
like hers point us back:
suicide
or cave man's
sacrificial rite? How red
did red flow for Carl?

When she raised
her hands, palms up, out
by her head,
did Ana
draw first the blood on Carl's nose,
scratch fresh his forearms?

~

She, naked,
from the window plunged.
Done, it's done.
What murder?
Simple proof makes dumb to eyes
witnessing no crime.

~

Who defends
her body absent,
rues her gone?
Which stranger's
reproach bids her check her fear
of heights in blood work?

~

Death makes art
of Ana's demise,
rests in tracks
in brown wounds,
in siluetas washed out
with red tide to sea.

© 2011 Maureen E. Doallas
___________________________________

Artist Ana Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948 and died in 1985, in a fall from the thirty-fourth-floor window of a New York City apartment she shared with her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre. Andre subsequently was arrested and charged with second-degree murder; three years later, the prosecution's case bungled, Andre was acquitted. It is not known whether Mendieta was pushed, jumped, or accidentally fell from the window.

"Where is Ana Mendieta? Donde esta Ana Mendieta? 25 Years Later: A Symposium" is the subject of this article, "The Case of Ana Mendieta", in Art in America, October 12, 2010, which, with others about Ana Mendieta, inspired my poem. 

Of Related Interest

Alistair Rider, Carl Andre: Things in Their Elements (Phaidon, 2011)

Robert Katz, Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta (Atlanta Monthly Press, 1990)

Randy Kennedy, "For Carl Andre, Less Is Still Less", The New York Times, July 14, 2011

Interestingly, Andre also is a poet.