Unmentionables

With my sister Edma

industrious we

hunker under Mama’s piano shawl

crumbs of madeleines at our slippers

are you ready yes I’m ready

lift the fringed brocade

light solid

with dust from the window

& how we hold

the paper stippled with pinholes

so the sun

sieves through

meaning—

once I learned this lesson,

I was seared.

Mother to my instructor:

“About Berthe’s painting, frankly, is it

as good as all that? Would anyone give

even twenty francs?”

To me:

“Imagination is all very well, until

it causes problems.”

I paint outdoors all day. When I return,

she gives me cut lemons

to rub the freckles from my hands.

My fingers twitch in sleep, she says—

even in my dreams I paint.

Let them—

Degas, Renoir, Manet with his two-pronged beard—

go to the Café Guerbois.

Let them drink calvados

roll tobacco

argue aesthetics

with newsprint on their forearms

then go to maisons de rendez-vous

fuck the white-necked girls

wearing velvet chokers—

let them.

On their way home, let them look up

from the cobbles

to where I’ve hung the yellow canvas

of my studio window

see

while you boys leapfrog in the alley

my light is burning

Again this year

my entries for the salon

rejected.

Somehow, I was unprepared.

I had to borrow the butcher’s wheelbarrow

to ferry the paintings home.

I steered between the brown and blue trousers

of the other painters. Some of them

called to me. I did not look up.

Pushed in deeper

the splinter from the handle.

Manet asks me to pose.

While he paints, he chats,

but only of his wife, his trip

to Brazil: nothing I can use.

He studies me and taps

his brush against the can:

twenty-nine, thirty.

What if—

he left the easel walked toward me

his brush orange-tipped,

what if

he laid the brush

aside my cheek and stroked down

under my jaw, over

my collarbone a trail glistening

smooth as a snail’s sliding

between my breasts down my white belly down

the bristles

merging with my bristles

oil meeting oil

undressing at home I find

orange on my lace bodice

When I invited Manet to critique my new piece,

I meant praise.

He found it good, he said, reaching for my hand,

good, but for the lower part of Mama’s dress.

He sighed the brush from my fingers,

stepped to my easel, and,

joking over his shoulder,

painted over the hem,

the skirt, the bust, the collar,

Mama’s face now a stranger’s,

my pale symphony

Maneted into a glorious parody.

As he was leaving, I think

I even thanked him

I am a puzzlement to myself

hard to believe

Mama says

my first word was no.

Entered. Enlarged. The shoulders

of our easels rubbing, facing

the sea.

Strange

birdcalls above us, like seams being ripped.

Wild my hair blows, salty

his forked beard. I can not

not no longer. Over

the wooden darning knob

his fat Suzanne at home

stretches his sock, humming, humming, wifely.

Here, I fall. Languish.

I deny nothing,

nothing to him, not even:

Relinquish. Marry my brother, Eugène.

I marry his brother, Eugène.

Bed

bound, waiting in, lying on my side,

trifling with oils,

my belly so big with child I rest my palette on it.

My brush unwinds a promising profile,

with just three more strokes, Eugène’s head entire,

a sanguine comma alone

fleshes his nostril—

then a kick so big my hand hiccups

and the palette toboggans

down my belly, smearing the bedclothes.

An omen?

Monet said sadly, learning

of my pregnancy, “Gentlemen, we shall lose her.”

Now the baby flips with difficulty,

cramped like the chick that, before hatching,

grows an egg tooth on its beak

to crack out . . .

I doze, wake—

fangs

through the stretched and primed canvas

of my flesh.

Julie sleeping on my shoulder—

my left hand

steadies her tiny back. My right hand

moves the brush.

I’m working. Yes, I’m working.

I was walking through the field of mustard—

we’re summering at 4 rue de la Princesse

so Eugène can take the air, his health so poor—

when I sighted Edma by the cherry tree

reading, in a white dress. I reached

for my watercolors,

but had no water to mix them . . .

I hesitated for a moment there

in the sunshine

then lifted from my blouse

my warm, milk-heavy breast.

Soon my fellow impressionists

are praising my new style—my

“great contribution to the movement”:

“Loose, calligraphic strokes

which produce the effect of spontaneity

and rapid brushwork”—

(I do not say, I must paint rapidly)

“Radical simplicity”—

“Exaggeration and blur”—

(I do not say, I haven’t slept)

The port scenes I adore— how do I reveal

their whiz and whir,

their pull skreek sail hoist sway?

With my thumb I scumble

the legs of the running boy

but I need more vroom.

I only half scrape

with my palette knife

my mispainted mast,

leaving the ghost of my moving mistake,

pentimento as fossil.

My former instructor to my mother:

Berthe is to go to the Louvre twice a week,

stand before Correggio,

and beg forgiveness.

Mallarmé visits my studio,

I send him away, there’s nothing to give him.

Outside my window the bonfire ashes send up papery

arabesques

of smoke . . .

I want to paint fresh as a child sees

I want to paint in a foreign language

I scoop ashes

into my smock, mix them

into the doveshade

of Julie’s dress

vibrating over dark grass

pull

of plum-colored bonnet

pull of plum-

colored book in her hands

I balance the umbrella

with the thumbed-open fan

her tapping foot blurs into the greenery.

My God I am so good I am

forgetting everything I learned

Fortnight I paddle

after the swans on the Bois de Boulogne

to get close enough to splinter

their prismatic white

not noticing

my kerchief untied by the fingers of wind

I think the swans grow to pity

this old duck, ungainly and wooden,

closing in

on their whiteness

and the whiteness of the sun smacking off the small waves

I gaze

until I think I can prove my gaze

a glance,

but fail.

Pain(but I can’t see to see)t.

I hold the canvas under with my oar.

Eugène worsens.

At fifty I am old.

I paint en plein air no more.

April: he gives me a bunch of violets.

I crush them

onto my palette,

suture my canvas

with violets.

Eugène dies. He dies. I too am ill.

Julie sets her easel beside mine, at the window.

We face the cherry tree. The model on the ladder

drops cherries into the other’s raised basket.

I use a fugitive lac de garance for her red hair.

Of what’s left to me, color

provides the sole pleasure, color,

and Julie’s company.

Of her talent:

good thing she is beautiful.

This composition nears its final form.

See how the ladder

is buffeted with light?

See how it wants to tremble?

It gets late so much later now. The crumbs of hours

on the tea table, too many to brush away.

More and more, I turn to reverie.

And why not?

Am I not yet that girl

who pried, in secret, the diamond

from Mama’s hat pin?

No one guessed no one ever guessed

I swallowed brilliance,

nature’s hardest substance

scoring me.

2

BERTHE MORISOT: RETROSPECTIVE