Montmartre, 1890s
Don’t look, but the sun is setting, and the leaves
Out there on the silver birches have turned gold:
You can almost hear them, jangling in the wind!
Why not paint that? Oh but you see, I do –
Searching your curves and hollows, yet with this
Decay staining the atmosphere, this chill,
This fog in the soul’s crevices.
And then, you know, I regard you with desire,
Which is the desire of art, and that includes
The desire for it to end, for you to leave
And for the night to come.
Well, shall I go
To The Green Monkey for the décolletage
Of that girl who hangs around there, the gas-light
Finding a coarser gold between her breasts
As it burns lips and cheeks a fiercer red?
Or to the gilded dark of Sacré Coeur
Where I can light a candle and attend
To the drone of Vespers, conscious that outside
The last rays yield crushed russet to grey ash?
But that’s already to have gone too far.
I like this moment, now:
This is the time when, work my compelling passion,
I nonetheless start longing. For what else?
Not to stop work but for something to be there
When the work stops. Moments, by definition,
End – without ending there can be no meaning,
No picture without frame.
So here, your chemise, your stockings, and all that –
Just let me wash this brush. Thank you, I share
Your pleasure in it. Though I have you here,
It’s always inward too, an act of mind –
Just knowing how you look
Where you’re not seen, watching the light pass
And labouring to catch one moment of it
To make your moment, charged with other times.
As for me, what I’ve been working for
Comes when you’ve left, although it couldn’t come
If you had not been here. My muffler on,
I’ll saunter down to watch the afterglow
Beyond the cemetery, as way beneath
Paris puts on her evening dress, her jewels
Flickering more acutely for the dark.