The Terrace, St. Tropez
A girl reclining by an open window.
I do not say this way
the only thing one saw that day.
There was a strip of luminous green,
pale and cool suggesting the sea,
or moss on wooden shutters.
But if on a white canvas I mark down
some sensation of blue or green,
each stroke diminishes the one preceding.
So you see there was, first of all, a girl.
I, bored and elegant, outside the scene
at a proper aesthetic distance.
She, Algerian, darker than almonds,
almost part of the terrace shadows.
I do not recall the season.
It may have been that autumn was soft and new,
or that it was indeed still summer.
Ten years ago I would have said
August, and let it go,
a soft brush stroke to suggest fullness.
But now I am hardly certain where the sea ends
or the sky begins.
Only my signature seems exact: Henri
just below the flagstones on the terrace walk.
She said to me (the day in fact
the canvas was complete),
Henri, she said, everything is melting and imprecise.
And you have chosen to paint me,
your woman, without character.
Months later I was telling my friends:
Algerians have no humor.
But now the trespass of the years
demands consideration.
Could one undo a painting or a memory
he could say simply: There was a girl
reclining by an open window.
But instead I will do a landscape, my last,
in which each of the leaves will be a girl
reclining: inexact, characterless.
Each will represent a painting which commenced
quite simply, until line followed line and color
color, filling the canvas,
and something (one could say purity)
was lost in the process.
A single leaf fallen shall be taken to mean
this same Algerian girl
who died, I'm told, one year in August
of nothing very fatal.
Copyright 1989 by Michael Hogan. From Making Our own Rules, New and Selected Poems
(Greenfield Review Press, 1989).
