(Gwen John, Painter, Rodin’s Model)
Cinnabar, Phoenician red, wild
geranium—to be played against
olive and smoky lime, a
mercury luster: quicksilver
the soul, most visible
in the empty room. Who saw
the wicker armchair open like Danae
to the cataract of citrus
light? Whose coat lies flung
across the frame? The Parisian garret
window gapes ajar, the bare
floor crackles, book
lies torqued along its spine,
splayed. “I don’t pretend
to know anybody well: people
are like shadows to me and I
am a shadow.” Her job: years
in an empty room, to wait.
The woman waits, the Master breaks his cloud-
cover unaccountably,
then she stands torqued
along her spine, splayed, in plaster
rises, an immortal
armless Muse turning
from him who turns from her. “Oh what
inquietude: eternal
adieu?” Raw sienna,
Payne’s gray, Naples yellow: she spins
her color wheel, grips
her brush. No adieu
but to twist in the Master’s ever-vanishing
embrace, to strike his poses,
plead, then lead
the long, fevered, scumbled hours alone.
“Make your harmonies, make
your harmonies.” Her brush
her own. And when the god, exhausted, dies,
she reigns already
in her vacancy:
has rendered from sunset, salmon, ashen-blue,
“Method: snowdrop in earth—
the road—the pink flower—“
“We must go on with our mysterious work.”
This poem originally appeared in American Poets, Spring-Summer 2016. Copyright © Rosanna Warren. Used with permission of the author.