You watched men in their shirtsleeves

slopping pot-au-feu de la mer, a woman’s

eyes die into a glass of sherry. The jaundiced

light would leak out of glass lanterns, spill

over all the corseted breasts.  At the Moulin Rouge,

a bilious laugh would follow you outside;

you could still see the woman’s blue clown face,

like a death mask from antiquity, her eyes plotted

in blue-white fat. Unnoticed, you sketched

the ugly desperation curled tight around hearts,

painted the monumental calm men find in drunkeness.

Your landscapes were salons, dance halls, the ether-like

atmosphere, mad carnival swirl of the bistros

where fulfillment went by, grasped back for an hour

by a glass of port, masquerading as joy.

The obsession with the human figure

brought you there; the deformation of the face

above footlights. You chose the darkness

that edges around the skin, hides between the inner thighs,

below the breasts like a secret.

Your record was faithful.

You understood the sadness of crowds,

you understood too the unwanted necessity

of your own solitude. The whores of Paris

became your family, their faces, tired

and sagging as over-ripened fruit, still

held the nobility of survival.  You were right,

there is nothing to cover up, let the brush strokes

bruise the canvas, let the nouns and drunken adjectives

fall out like broken teeth from an old woman,

dark and alone.