Transparency, and: Tenebrae

Transparency

At the Osterlinds, Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1919

1.

He steps into a garden of flowering
orange trees, white blossoms
like fluttering ghosts from some other life.
Surrounded by balmy verbena
and the musk of sage,
he thinks he hears his mother
calling through the capacious stillness,
but it is only the voice
of the fever.

The Swedish painter's daughter
brings her dolls onto the terrace, sits
through the heat of the day talking
in a language only they understand.
The Swedish painter and his wife
drink only tea. Noiselessly,
she drifts in and out
of the clean, white rooms,
leaving behind
her cough's echo.

He paints her
cheek resting on her hand, finds
a translucency like the sea just beyond
the window, kept open at all times.

He does not want white
like bones, he wants
to suck the marrow out
of bone, leaving only incandescence.

This, he tries to explain
to the painter's wife, cupping
his hand, as he once cupped
a chrysalis found
among the iris, trying
to show her
the absent shining -

2.

Some nights he escapes
           into the village to drink absinthe
alone at a table in the café. The sturdy
brown wood reminds him
of a still life by Cezanne. It is a table
          to make plans around, scarred,
resilient. Onto its dense surface, he might scatter
a half dozen oranges
from the Osterlind garden. He
runs his finger along the wood,
          believes he can read its history there.
Beyond the café,
the fragrance of eucalyptus and the murmuring of palm.
Later tonight there will be rain.

'It's too nice here,' he thinks, reminded
of the clean, white room that awaits,
          corridors echoing
with Rachel Osterlind's cough, his own. Seized
by longing for Soutine's violent landscapes,
he wants to paint the walls
                purple, scarlet.

He wants to pull the house down.

3.

The Swedish painter remembers weeping
before Cezanne's work
twelve years ago, Modigliani
at his side, their shoulders touching.

Lying with his wife in the white bed,
he tells her, "Amedeo understands
this purity, too; the clean line of cloth,
apples and lemons you could
reach out, hold."

With so much between them,
the Swedish painter cannot understand
why their guest now reproaches the good
chicken dinner, the calm of the white
rooms' only sounds, gulls and sea.

Beside him, Rachel, his wife,
says nothing. Just as she cannot explain
why their child sits for hours in the sun,
keeping up a wandering dialogue with her dolls,
she cannot describe
what she sees in the bruised shades
that rise up
through Modigliani's canvas,
her portrait,
the way the lines of her
face disappear,

that same light she remembers
seeing in her dying mother's
face, as if in the body's
waning, the soul
hovers near the surface,
just waiting
to climb out.

Tenebrae

"Bury him like a prince"

- Emanuele Modigliani

Pale sun like quince,
   and in a doorway
a cat stretches. Morning,
and the grocer places
                    plums and loaves
in the window.
A child's tremolo
       rings from
the apartment above.
   A boy in olive green
pedals by, drops
newspapers, one by one,
a series of tiny thuds.
                    The sun
lights the tops
of chestnut trees
   as the cat closes in
on its shadow. The cat
bats a dustball, catches
a mouse.
                    Focused
on locating an address,
a man in a foreign suit notices
nothing.

          Upstairs, the studio
                    smells of emptiness
despite rolls of papers,
          the faded clues
to a life. Seldom
intimate, he has come
   in search of echoes,
          his brother's long feet
in these light-filled rooms.
                    While the cat stalks
shadows in the alley below,
upstairs in the room
stripped of palette
and canvas, the man stoops
   over the stove, reaches
                    inside and,
   letting the sooty darkness
sift through his fingers, anoints
                    the air with ashes.