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Monsieur Degas
Outside his room, the supply shops on Rue Victor
Mass�
droop under swinging scythes of rain. A used canvas
needs merely to be chosen, re-stretched and primed:
like this one, chronicling a bouffant-haired flirt
still ga-ga for something dear just past his
shoulder.
Of course, like any style he's gotten older,
the models change (is it a grief he's never taken
wife or lover?)
though not their arms, akimbo when they're tired,
or how they'll pull a blowsy towel along one hip.
He'd prefer both to keep and to alter all:
the new colors are both the hours deepening and the
way
a lucky man proceeds, with time shivering in the
vestibule,
ever more audaciously. Pauline has said he'd set
afire
a whole ringed grove of easels�he'd shift
from one to another loosening blurs of hair,
and this was easier on a girl than stooping
to read the bottom of her bare right foot all morning
(if only Zo�, the housekeeper, had ever dusted!).
Monsieur would touch them just with chalk or
brushes—
they were the weather he must step through to reach
again
the mote-stunned studio he'd loved for twenty years
and where he'd already be fidgeting when she arrived
in cheap hat and bustle, wet parasol, and the skin
he'd daub with green today to make it modern,
welcome.
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