It started with herrings, which he ate
with warm black bread as a child,
and ended with two pigs, the forbidden.
It started with the strict dietary laws
of his father, a pious Jew, a mender,
and ended with ulcers, which he disobeyed.
He was snubbed by a bouquet
of colorful flowers on a balcony
and a pretty pink vase with flowers,
but red gladiolas from the countryside
in a flower shop next to a laundry
suddenly reached out to him.
He never expected so much water
in a dead rayfish, so much fire
in a turkey hanging from a fireplace.
He never expected to find his soul
hiding in a chicken splayed
open-winged on the blue ground.
Who needed a mirror against the wall?
He found an enormous carcass of beef
with all of its entrails exposed.
He loved the savagery of the match
and slashed his brush into the canvas
until the painting wobbled on its legs.
He was a boxer forcing his opponent
into a tight corner, taking him apart
with quick jabs and a right cross.
One punch for a shack in Smilovitchi,
two punches for a pair of older brothers
who attacked him in the kitchen.
One punch for the village thug
who thrashed him for drawing a rabbi,
two punches for the Second Commandment.
“Thou shalt not …” But Rembrandt painted
the portrait of a bearded Jew, a woman
bathing in a stream, the slaughtered ox.
Homage to the Jewish painters in Paris:
a scrawny hen for Kikoïne, a donkey
for Chagall, a pheasant for Modigliani.
He traveled back and forth to the Louvre.
He carried a giant slab of meat
on his back through the graveyard.
His lover said that his studio looked
like a slaughterhouse on Friday afternoon.
He no longer kept the Sabbath,
but he could scarcely endure the stench
and sprinkled blood on the carcass
to keep it fresh, like an open wound.
Some days his brush was a knife,
some days a scalpel. Some days
he worked like a surgeon
separating the ligaments of a patient
wounded on the table, calmly
cutting the flesh away from the bone.
He could not forget the village butcher
who shouted out with joy
when he sliced the neck of a bird
and drained the force out of it.
He could not abandon the boy
who had stifled his cry.
Let's leave a space for the paintings
that he lacerated and destroyed
with the radical fury of the creator.
Let's leave a space for his portraits
of the wind in the French countryside,
invisible presences, awe-filled nights.
It was a calm day. A void encircled
a solitary figure of flayed beef.
A void enclosed the painter.
I stood in the middle of a silent room
and surveyed the beauty of carnage,
the dangerous carnage of beauty.
So many brushstrokes in a painting,
and so much blood. So much art
in a still life, and so much death.