Sandra M. Gilbert

Sandra M. Gilbert has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Aftermath (2011) and among prose books Wrongful Death, Death's Door, Rereading Women, and, in 2014, The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity. She is currently at work on a new collection of poems, Saturn’s Meal, and on Eating Words, an anthology of food writing coedited by Roger Porter. With Susan Gubar, she is coauthor of The Mad Woman in the Attic and other works: the two received the 2012 Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle.

Thiebaud's Girl With Ice Cream Cone

is really his wife Betty Jean,
hair half down, half scooped

into a pseudo-forties
sixties style, but here

the soles of her feet
are blue as if

she's been walking
on twilight—

though
with her legs in an erotic

V, pin-up
swimsuit, brooding

Ava Gardner cheekbones posed,
musing, above a heap of pink

in its own gold V
of a cone, she's emphatically

all flesh,
and yet, eyes wide,

she seems to be wondering
at herself, wondering

what is this body that yearns for sweets, whose
are these eyes transcribing

mine, & whose this body already
remembering mine, as he

uncovers my luscious
impasto, while murmuring

(to me or to himself?)
"It's just like heroin, once

you get a taste of it." *

[*"It's just like heroin....": Wayne Thiebaud on painting]